Sword Monkeys and Weaponized Feelings
by Anycents
Summary: This strange, gloomy island Zoro has found himself on contains a lot of annoying obstacles preventing him from returning to his crew, foremost among them a pink-haired ghost witch.
1. Chapter 1

_**Be warned, Perona has the power to make people hate themselves and she's not shy about using it.**_

* * *

Zoro tries to focus, but his body doesn't want to move. He cracks his eyes open all he can see is the glare of sunlight off clouds. He has been fading in and out of consciousness for two, maybe three, days now.

His memories of that time consist of wind whistling past and half-conscious views of endless blue, clouds, or stars. He has no control over his movement, so all he can do in between blackouts is seethe about what was happening behind him and wonder when, or even if, he is going to land.

He's getting very thirsty.

Finally, he wakes up to the feeling of striking the ground, but with less force then expected given how far he has flown. Not even hard enough to break through a brick wall.

He should get up now that he has finally been released from that bubble.

He must drift off again though because the he is woken up by a high pitched shriek, "Th…this guy's one of Straw Hat's crew!"

That sounds like trouble; he tries to shift to prepare to defend himself and manages to turn his head toward the sound. He opens his eyes in time to glimpse a silhouette gliding away. He needs to move.

This time he comes to with his arms pulled over his head and the feeling of fingers digging into his wrists. He hears boots scraping on the dirt and curses mixed with noises of frustration, "Why are you so stupidly heavy! This is ridiculous!"

He tries to ask her what the hell she's doing and pull his hands free, but only manages a groan and enough of a twitch to get the attention of the woman tugging on his arms, "Hey, if you're awake stop lying there like a lump and move your feet unless you want to stay out in the woods overnight."

That didn't sounds so bad. Not like he'd never slept outside before.

She growls and drops his arms walking around to his side. He cracks his eyes open and sure enough it's the pink haired woman with the ghost powers from Thriller Bark. Perona.

She looks down at him in irritation "You have your shadow. What did you horrible people do to Moria?" She kicks at his side, he can't tell if she was trying to hurt him or not.

His mind flashes back to the events that happened at Thriller Bark, how it ended with Kuma, then Sabaody, and Kuma again. Somewhere in there he loses track of her question and closes his eyes again.

He hears a 'che' of offence and a slight scuff as she crouches down, then a quiet 'clack' as she pokes at his swords. He tries to growl at her, but the sound comes out quieter then he intends and she ignores him.

There is a huff of effort as she tries to shift Shusui without any success, "Here's the problem. What is this thing even made of."

He feels a hand pushing at his haramaki and then her hands are loosening his sword belt. He lifts his hand enough to wrap it around a bony wrist, prompting a startled squeak.

"No," he manages to get out; trying for as much menace as possible despite the fact he can barely move right now.

In response she widens and then narrows her weirdly round flat eyes. A maniacal giggle starts up on his other side. That's not a good sound.

A feeling of ice cold passes through him and he's hit with a wave of despair that snaps his will to fight and takes his consciousness with it.

 _He dreams of his crewmates screaming in anger and panic as he lays there unable to move. His mind repeats over and over the things that happened in front of him that he couldn't prevent and the things that could have happened after he got tossed away._

* * *

When Zoro wakes up again he's in a narrow bed with bandages wrapped around him. He shifts around, unfamiliar knots, not as tidy as Chopper's work.

He hears a chair shift and the clack of hard soled shoes, "Cleaning up your wounds was so not cute," a familiar voice sniffs, "You owe me."

Zoro tenses and tries to jerk into a sitting position at the reminder of who else is here. He only gets about half way before his stomach muscles spasm and he ends up propping himself halfway up with an elbow.

They're in a room no bigger than a storage closet. She's between him and a door that takes up most of one wall. Her feet are resting on the ground so she's probably physically here, rather than in her ghost form. She seems irritated (though he doesn't see how he's to blame) but not hostile.

He braces himself for the pain and swings his legs around so he can drop them to the floor and lever himself up into a sitting position.

"I didn't ask you to do that, I would have been fine," ignoring Perona's indignant snort, he looks around.

He scowls at her, "Where are my swords?"

She crosses her arms, "You can't even walk. What do you need swords for?"

So she's not going to be any help. Zoro places his feet and stands, focusing on keeping his balance well enough to stay upright.

The pink haired woman looks surprised and a little worried, "What are you doing? Lay back down!"

He's heard that line so often it's almost comforting, as if things are proceeding as they should. Better people then her have tried to give him that order though, "I'm going to find my swords and get back to my crew."

She is standing between him and the door, so he starts moving toward her focusing on keeping his gait deliberate rather than shuffling.

"Don't ignore me! I said lay down!" Perona demands, narrowing her eyes. One of her goofy looking negative hollows rears up over her shoulder. He makes it a couple more steps before it swoops toward him with a terrifying giggle.

 _He's wounded, weak. He doesn't know where he is, where they are. It's probably already too late. He can't help them. Couldn't help them. They would have been better off if he hadn't been there._ "I should be reborn as pond scum."

He feels the tile of the floor pressing into the side of his face as he slips into unconsciousness again.

He wakes up in the bed again. The ghost woman isn't around.

* * *

In his sleep he's clenched his fists so tightly that it takes a few tries, flexing his fingers back and forth, before he can open his hands all the way.

He sits up slowly, but he's able to swing his feet down to the floor without any embarrassing pauses this time. His head feels like crap though. He rubs his temples then gets up and starts slowly walking toward the door.

He comes out into what appears to be a large kitchen. Did she stick him in a pantry? He circles the room looking for the way out. There's a lot of clutter, only one stove and a nearby table seem to have seen any use recently.

There's a sink with a water pump, he levers it a few times until water starts coming out and then drinks greedily directly from the stream.

After circling a couple times he finally finds a door that leads out to a big room with walls made of stone blocks and floor to ceiling windows on one side. There's a long table surrounded by chairs. He's in a castle?

There doesn't seem to be anyone else around. Again, though the main part of the room looks relatively clean, the tapestries of the walls are faded and there is dust in corners and the ceiling. There are no more than a few people here. They don't want to live in filth, but they aren't trying to maintain an entire castle on their own.

Where should he look first?

"What are you doing?" Perona glides down from an upper level and hovers a few feet away from him in her ghost form. She's looking at him like he's an idiot.

Zoro has no intention of continuing to lie around in a strange place while who knows what is happening to everyone else, "Looking for my swords. Where are they?"

She gets irritated, "You landed a good half mile away by the way. It was a huge pain dragging you back here. You should be grateful I did that much." She pauses as if expecting something from him.

He has a vague memory of the ghost witch messing with his sword belt and feels a spike of worry, quickly smothered by anger. He clenches his fists, "You left them lying out there?"

She gives a disinterested shrug in response, "It was too troublesome to bring them back."

It's infuriating that she is speaking of his most prized possessions as if they mean nothing, "Bullshit, you're afraid of letting me have them."

"Horohorohoro," she laughs at him, then reaches forward and jabs her hand at his eyes. He automatically reaches up to block, but his hand passes right through her arm and she completes her swing passing her hand through his face.

"We can't touch each other like this," she explains looking smug, then she singsongs, "~buuut I have these," little ball shaped hollows start to appear around her. She sends one out into the middle of the big room and it explodes releasing at shock wave that rattles the room, shaking copious amounts of dust from the ceiling.

So while she's in ghost form, she can hit him and he can't hit back. Zoro counters, "Your real body is around here somewhere, you can't stay locked up in a closet somewhere forever, ghost girl."

"Horohorohoro," One of her negative hollows peeks over her shoulder and then it swoops in and starts to circle around him, its stupid smiling face and lolling tongue belying how dangerous it is. Zoro resists the urge to turn and keep it in sight, it's not like he could block it anyway.

Perona leans forward in the air, "Nope, I had to come out here in person so I could bandage you up," she adds a scolding, "You really should be more grateful about that."

Zoro crosses his arms, "Last time I saw you, you were doing your best to help your boss steal my crew's shadows. Why'd you bother?"

She leans forward in the air, the ghost circles around to hover next to her again, "What happened to Moria?"

He can do this. He needs to find his swords, get off this island, and find his crew. He just needs to hold onto that.

Well, she did ask, "Last I saw your boss, he had been beaten unconscious by my captain. That bastard shouldn't have picked a fight with - " The ghost sweeps forward and strikes his chest and suddenly the difficulty of just existing is unbearable.

 _Why can't he keep his mouth shut? He can't defend himself against her. He's weak. He should just give up and give her whatever she wants._ "I should crawl on the ground and eat dirt."

The feeling of utter self-hatred starts to fade. He opens his eyes to see his own knees. He has collapsed with his forehead to the floor and his hands fisted above his head.

He slowly unclenches his fists and sits back on his heels. Ok, so bracing didn't work _at all_.

Perona is still floating a few feet away, hands on her hips, looking pleased with herself. Pissing her off is counterproductive, he should be more careful.

He clenches his jaw. It's disturbing that he doesn't know how much of that previous thought is due to her attack. He takes a couple deep breaths and tries to organize his thoughts.

He briefly contemplates weather he should start searching the castle until he finds her actual body. But no, he would have to take her by surprise and kill her without warning or she could use her ghosts to incapacitate and kill him. The idea leaves a sour taste in his mouth. He would rather just not have to deal with her anymore.

He doesn't know how to counter her power _at the moment_.

He takes hope from the fact that Usopp had been able to resist her ability somehow. The sniper had said he's 'always negative.' Zoro hadn't really understood what he meant at the time and hadn't given it much thought. There were too many other things going on and he had been satisfied with the knowledge that his crewmate had the situation under control.

He hopes briefly that it's not actually the case that Usopp feels like _that_ all the time, especially not with such intensity. The sniper is always doing things, making useful stuff and spectacular messes with equal enthusiasm. He doesn't lie around moaning all day. He does his worrying on the go. Zoro needs to learn to do whatever Usopp is doing if he's going to defend himself.

He's never had to train this sort of thing. He can already tell it's going to be a pain in the ass.

Also, he needs to find out more about his situation.

While he's thinking all this Perona has started complaining, mostly to herself, "I need to get out of here and make sure Moria is okay. I've been here for weeks by myself. No servants. No pets. No one to comfort me. No one to clean or cook. I've been living off _canned_ food. It's disgusting."

She finally notices that Zoro's breathing has evened out and realizes that the swordsman is no longer recovering and is simply ignoring her. Her annoyance ratchets up even more, "Of course, when someone does show up it would have to be _you_ , not someone who's actually _useful_ or least decent company."

Zoro huffs, stands up and looks her in the eye, "Do you actually have any kind of plan or were just sitting around hoping someone else would come along that you could bully into solving your problems for you?"

The pink menace leans back putting her hands on her hips, "I'd like to see you do any better. This entire island is a disaster area. There's nobody here, just a bunch of ruins and empty fields. Unless you know how to build a ship from scratch, we're stuck here."

"I'll build a raft from logs and paddle from here if I have to."

"Do you even know how to do _that_?"

"I'll figure something out, you give up too easily," he turns and walks back toward the kitchen. He'll see if he can find anything useful and then head out.

He goes back into the pantry. She probably left him in here because it was one of the few clean areas in the castle that didn't involve going up stairs. He grabs an empty flour sack from a pile lying in the corner. He stuffs some packages of dried fruit and meat off the shelf.

Whoever is using this place hasn't been gone more than a few weeks. It's hard to say how they will react when they come back, another reason not hang around here. It all has the potential to be way too troublesome.

He goes back out into the main kitchen area. Perona is floating there watching. He digs around in the drawers around the stove till he finds some matches.

She laughs, "Going to go play outside?" when he ignores her, she yawns, "Ok, fine. I'll come back and check on you in a few hours and you can show me all the brilliant progress you've made. The place where you landed was directly east of the front stairs."

She floats off and he heads back to the dining room. After wandering around a bit, he finds a wide hallway that leads past several large rooms, all filled with dust and decaying furniture. At the end is a wide pair of double doors. He pushes open a smaller door built into the one of the large doors and finds himself at the top of a wide set of steps overlooking a deteriorating courtyard and a broad road, partially turned to mud, leading away between some trees.

The sky is overcast, but it seems to be late afternoon. He remembers there being trees around so he decides to head off into the woods.

* * *

A few hours later he is standing in the square of a destroyed village. He's just finished inspecting a large cross that seems to be carved out of the remains of what must have been a massive tree. The cross beam is at least twenty five feet wide and it's of one piece with the center post. The memorial melds into a sprawl of fat twisting roots. The carved part is the only unmarred surface in these ruins, made after the fighting had ended.

There are human bones piled here and there all through the ruins, remnants of a battle where no one was left to bury the dead.

Someone has rifled through the corpses though, there are bits of armor missing, and sheathes without any weapons in sight.

As he's contemplating what this could mean when he's seen no sign of living people anywhere around, one of Perona's ghosts comes gliding down over the rooftops and waggles back and forth in front of him. It's probably trying tell him off, but the effort is undercut by the lolling tongue.

It circles him a few times then heads off at an angle to his previous path. When he doesn't follow, the ghost stops and waggles some more. Zoro picks a different street and starts walking again.

'Neg-a-tive, Neg-a-tive,' the ghost's chanting starts up following him at a little faster than a walking pace. The threat is clear, turn around and follow or the ghost is going to strike him.

He grits his teeth and keeps walking. He's not going to be herded like a sheep.

The crew dealt with impossible seeming situations all the time. Why should that feeling of despair be harder to overcome then looking almost certain death in the face? It makes no sense.

It's right behind him now.

He's about to be struck with the certainty that all his life's ambitions are not only ashes, but also garbage. He lacks any means the block the attack.

Is there some way to at least roll with the blow?

As the ghost draws near, he drops down to sit cross legged on the ground, back straight, and elbows braced on his knees. The hollow passes over his head. He looks up and draws in a deliberate breath as the ghost circles around. He refuses to flinch as it makes another dive for his chest.

It will pass.

 _He should just let himself be herded, since he's too dumb to find his way on his own._ _Even his crewmates agree there is something wrong with him. Even Chopper. He's never going to find a counter because he deserves to feel this way. He's worthless._ "I should be reborn as tree moss."

This time when his vision clears, he finds that he's still sitting up, though he's hunched over as if he had absorbed an actual blow to the chest. He straightens up, focuses on his breathing, and clears his head.

It's difficult at first, there is a strong urge to fall over on his back and lay there like a dead bug, but he leans on habit. This isn't the first time he's had trouble meditating, though it's usually anger, not despair, sapping his resolve to continue.

These attacks go beyond causing doubt in his ability to win, something he's faced before and pushed through. Better to die then live as a coward.

This is like he doesn't even have the right to try. As though his insistence is nothing more than an embarrassment and a burden. And that is new.

His mind flashes back to Water 7 and the fight between Usopp and Luffy after Franky's gang had beaten Usopp up and stolen the crew's cash. Usopp accused the rest of them of pitying him. He had said that the crew would eventually see him as a burden and abandon him.

At the time, Zoro had barely understood what Usopp was going on about. Their lives were in one another's' hands constantly. What kind of morons would trust to that extent out of pity? How could Usopp accuse Luffy, of all people, of not valuing his crew?

The worst part had been that Usopp had behaved as if he had no responsibility to the rest of them after everything they had all been through together. As if it did not matter weather one of them stayed or left.

Zoro had never asked why he said those things. He had been glad to put the incident behind them. Usopp had not truly abandoned them and he had apologized for making them think he would do so.

But this was the answer. Whatever defense Usopp had against the negativity that was a part of him, it had crumbled that day in the face of everything that had happened and the emptied words had come pouring out of him. _"I'm nothing more than a baggage boy who can't hold onto the cash."_

Zoro takes a deep breath and lets it slowly out through his nose. To his mind a person's actions were what mattered, not the excuses they made for why. But it was like there had been a fight going on that he had not even been aware of till now.

This is all giving him a headache.

What use can he even make from this realization? He snorts to himself; don't make decisions while under the influence of negative ghosts. Very helpful.

The witch's irritating laugh comes drifting down from overhead, "So, satisfied that this whole place is a lost cause?" She glides down and hovers in front of him.

Zoro stands up and crosses his arms, "I'm not going back to the castle till I get my swords back."

Perona looks incredulous, "You're still on about that? You aren't even remotely in the right area. There's some kind of huge animals out here. I've seen them lurking around. If you sleep out here, you'll get attacked and probably die!"

He keeps his tone as contemptuous as possible, "So, what's it to you? I told you everything I know about Moria. I didn't lie." He'd rather be without her help if her ghosts go with her. The physical danger of wild animals would be far easier to deal with.

Her already huge eyes widen in outrage at his tone, he doesn't have time to brace himself this time before the ghost hits him.

 _This island contains threats he's probably too injured to handle. Is he so scared of Perona's attacks he would rather get killed then risk them? Worthless, backwards pride._ "I deserve this."

He hears her giggling somewhere over his head, "Ok, I feel better now." She continues with sarcastic sweetness, "I'll see you later Zo~ro."

He is lying flat on the ground, his front and the side of his face pressed into the gritty, slightly damp earth. It takes him a few minutes after coming back from his depressive blackout to work up the will to sit up this time. Maybe it was because the attacks were so close together, "Che, excuses."

He pushes himself up yet again and falls back onto his heels. The pink witch and her ghosts are gone. That had been his goal. He catches himself worrying weather cowardice motivated the desire to drive her off. He reminds himself there's no benefit to fighting her. His Goal is to find his swords and get back to the crew.

He picks at his bandages for a few minutes. They're at least a couple days old and looking kind of dirty. He decides to unwrap his arms. He doesn't really have any deep external damage there. He decides to leave the ones around his chest for now, since it kind of feels like some of his ribs are cracked and his shoulders might be a little burned.

Despite what Chopper says, he doesn't actually _want_ to puncture his lungs or get an infection. There's no one here he trusts to treat him if something happens.

He wonders where Perona found a shirt that fits him, he just now noticed it isn't the one he was wearing before.

He gets up and dusts himself off again. He's glad there's no one around to see that he has bruises on his knees and elbows from falling down so much today.

There are some trees in the distance, so he heads that way.

* * *

By nightfall Zoro's found his way back to the woods. He spots a sturdy tree and climbs up to settle his back against the trunk. His stomach grumbles and he pulls a couple of pieces of dried meat and fruit out to gnaw on. He should pace himself, he only knows how to identify a few obvious edible plants, like blackberries, and he hasn't seen any of them around here.

He dozes off only to be woken in the middle of the night by the distinctive sounds of weapons clashing and animals howling.

He drops out of the tree to investigate.

There's red light coming from the heavy cloud cover, as if reflected from the light of fires on the ground. How can that be when there are no people here?

Following the sounds, he quickly comes to a clearing. There are hunched, long faced shadows moving around, not human, but he can see glints of light off of armor and weapons as they clash. Even more surprising is that, though they aren't particularly skilled by his reckoning, there is never the less technique to their attacks.

As he watches, one of the larger creatures is cut down and the vanquished group turns and flees the scene.

The victor lifts his weapon and howls in triumph. Sandai Kitetsu flashes in the low light, blood still dripping from the blade.

Zoro grins as he charges forward and clocks the first creature he comes across in the jaw hard enough to make it crack. He snatches the saber clutched in its oversized hand and immediately strikes out at anything that gets between him and the creature currently holding his blade.

Finally, something straight forward to deal with.

Disappointingly, it doesn't take most of the creatures long to cringe back from the fight. Once the first half dozen have gone down, the rest back off forming a loose circle around their leader.

The creature's fighting style isn't even fully suited to the katana he is using. The fight should be easy. Embarrassingly, Zoro has allowed himself to get spoiled with blades that don't break as soon as he presses on them a little too hard.

In his enthusiasm for finally having an enemy he can deal with, he strikes too hard and, after only a few blows, the poorly tended blade in his hand snaps allowing Sandai Kitetsu to slide off the broken stub and take a slice out of his free arm. He can sense the blade's smugness from here.

But the creature has left itself wide open. It's only a matter of stepping in and using the broken saber's handle to deliver a shattering blow to his enemy's face and another to its temple and the creature is slumping to the ground at his feet.

He pulls the cursed blade from the fallen figure and shakes his own blood from the blade. He clenches his hand around the hilt, even in this low light he can tell the sword is covered in filth.

That woman left his blades sitting in a hole in the ground as if they were garbage to be picked up by whatever wandering strays happened by.

He places his foot on the fallen creature's back, blade out at his side, staring down the other hunched figures. It doesn't take long for them to slink away, leaving their fallen leader behind them.

He bends down and pulls out his sword's saya from a worn belt around his opponent's waist. It's not cracked, but he can't tell if any other damage has been done in this light.

His arm is still bleeding. After squeezing some blood out of the wound to try and reduce the amount of dirt in it, he tears off a strip off the bottom of the shirt and wraps it around the cut.

He grins to himself. Everyone is always giving him a hard time about being lost, but somehow he ends up in the right place anyway. It hardly matters where he originally landed if his blades aren't there anymore.

It's only matter of time before he finds Wado Ichimonji and Shusui and reclaims them from whatever garbage has laid hands on them. After that, somewhere in this wreckage there is something he can use as a boat.

He is not going to just sit around and wait for things to work themselves out.

As he's thinking along these lines, he leaves the clearing and heads back into the trees. He somewhat awkwardly pulls himself one armed into another tree and gets himself against the trunk. He uses another scrap of shirt to wipe the worst of the filth of Sandai Kitetsu, before sheathing it. He will need to clean it better when he can see.

He can feel the blade sulking, though from its mistreatment or being unable to end Zoro's life he can't tell. He settles back against the tree to doze. It doesn't matter, he knows what he needs to do and the recalcitrant blade is the least of his concerns.

* * *

 ** _So, I'm glad to have_ finally _finished another story. It's been a very long year, but I was determined to keep trying to write at least a little bit._ _  
_ _Thank you for reading! I would love to hear what you think :)_**


	2. Chapter 2

When the morning comes Zoro uses some more scraps of shirt to clean off Sandai Kitetsu as best he can. What are the chances, on island bristling with discarded weapons, that an intact bottle of sword oil could be found? Something to keep an eye out for.

He starts wandering. There are streams occasionally and even wildlife and fish. This island has been in ruins for years and all the things that could rot away have done so, leaving collapsed stone buildings surrounded by ragged returning wilderness.

One of Perona's ghosts comes by while he's looking at the ruins of a cottage garden. It circles him a couple times, and then floats regarding him with its flat eyes from a few paces away. He tries to ignore his audience.

After kicking around for a bit, he's pleased to spot a few scrubby looking carrots and potatoes growing in one corner. He pulls them up and goes to wash them off in a nearby stream. There's some decent sized fish in the shadows along the edges there. He could stab a few easily enough.

He takes off his boots and wades into the stream.

The ghost floats off a bit and then comes back several times over the course of his fishing, as if its operator can't quite decide whether she's lost interest.

He's surprised when half an hour later, after he's caught half a dozen fish, the pink haired ghost girl comes floating into the clearing, "You are disgusting. Is that blood on your arm? What'd you accidently stab yourself or something?"

"I reclaimed one of my blades from some kind of ape creature last night. They took them from where you left them lying on the ground. If anything has happened to Wado Ichimonji, I won't forgive you."

Perona stares at him for a few seconds before she leans back and starts laughing, "Horohorohoro… you named your swords? …Who am I kidding, of course you did. They're probably, like, your best friends or something."

Zoro wades out of the stream and plops down on the ground to put his boots back on. Then he gathers up the stuff he's found in what's left of his shirt and pulls out a carrot to munch on while he starts walking again.

He's got to be nearly out of her sight between the trees when she calls after sarcastically, "Did I hurt your feelings?"

It's frustrating that all these trees look pretty much the same. He's not even sure if he's been through here before or not. The carrots are surprisingly sweet. Sadly, there were only a few of those. He hears her overhead somewhere, "Did your brain fall out of your ears or something?!"

Perona obviously doesn't deal well with silence. Zoro loves how easy it is to annoy that kind of person.

He ends up back at the derelict garden and not long after crossing to get to a different group of trees, she drops down in front of him, "So what are you going to do with all that stuff? Eat it raw? Do you know how to cook?" She sounds slightly hopeful with that last question.

He considers the ghost girl floating in front of him. He doesn't understand why she keeps following him when she seems to despise everything about him. He starts looking around for dead wood and clears out an area.

Perona looks increasingly put out by his continued silence as he builds a fire. While he's getting a fire started, she just starts rambling at him, "I miss Kumashi. He may have had a gross voice, but he always made sure I had my favorite things to eat, played games with me, and kept everything nice a clean. My pets used to put on shows for me all the time."

She goes in this vein for a while, bringing up the names of her various zombie pets and all the efforts they would go through to please her and keep her entertained. "And then you lot showed up and ruined everything. That awful sniper of yours destroyed Kumashi and all the rest of them."

Zoro establishes a fire and stands up to start looking for some branches green enough that he can use them to skewer the fish, "You're still sulking about having your toys taken away? They were all stolen to begin with."

Behind him he hears the pink witch suck in a sharp breath, he turns sideways just in time to avoid a hollow passing through his chest.

She glowers at him as the ghost circles back around to hover over her shoulder, "They were my friends!"

Zoro freezes, working through his denial over what her statement implies, "You think those things were _friends_?"

Perona rolls her eyes, "Of course, they entertained me, worshiped me, and did whatever I wanted."

When Zoro just stares at her, she continues on, "Of course, I would have to be stuck here with someone like _you_ , who doesn't know how to be a proper friend at all. Kuma is so mean."

She floats with her arms crossed, glowering at him while a couple hollows circle around her. She is clearly expecting some response.

He did have to agree that, for a robot, Kuma had a pretty nasty sense of humor, sending him to this abandoned place where his only company is an incorporeal witch with weaponized feelings who doesn't know the difference between a friend and a slave. Maybe he thought Zoro was too prideful.

Well they both want to leave here, "If you make yourself useful maybe we could get off this island and you won't have to pester me anymore."

Perona waves this notion away as a waste of time, instead demanding, "Tell me a story. Your crew has traveled half the grand line, even you should have something to say about that."

Zoro wouldn't normally entertain her demand, but then again he's never been in this kind of situation before.

He tells himself that it's like drawing out opponents with banter, distracting them from attacking until he can find a counter. It's going to be a pain, but it's all he has to work with. He needs to keep her from slowing him down too much. He has things to do.

Perona decides to prompt him, "Tell me about your stretchy, idiot captain. How did someone like _you_ end up following someone like _him_?"

Zoro reacts to the contempt in her voice, "You should know better than to underestimate my captain. He's going to be Pirate King."

He turns and snaps a couple branches off a nearby tree so he can continue his dinner preparations while talking. He considers what he wants to say. The story is embarrassing, but he's also a sick of people constantly underestimating his captain.

He finds a rock with enough of an edge on it to rub the loose bark off the branches. He states as a matter of fact, "I killed a dog that was about to attack a kid. Turned out the mutt belonged to the son of the commander of the town's navy base. The brat demanded that I allow them to tie me up in the base's yard for a month or he would punish the girl and her mother instead."

Perona rolls her eyes and makes a reeling motion with her hand, "And you agreed. Sooo noble of you…Idiot. Let me guess, he broke his word."

He snorts, "You're right." He lets out a slow breath, this is the embarrassing part, "I believed that just because a spoiled brat was with the Marines it would somehow make up for the coward's complete lack of personal honor."

As he talks, he guts the fish with Sandai Kitetsu, skewers them on the sticks, and angles the sticks over the fire.

"Luffy found out the marines were planning to execute me in few more days despite the brat's promise to set me free once I served my time. My captain came back and wrecked the whole base even though I'd already refused to join him and called him scum besides."

Zoro snorts in derision at his past stupidity, "The navy was punishing me on a whim and Luffy was trying to free me and I was still so sure who I should trust."

"You call Luffy an idiot, and it's true that he doesn't understand a lot of _things_ , but he sees through _people_ as if they were made of glass." He thinks of Whisky Peak, but decides not to add 'unless there's food involved.'

"He sees what matters and protects it without fear or reserve. That's why I follow him."

Perona is not impressed, "Well, that sounds _nice_ and all, but in _practice_ it's led you here."

The potatoes are small enough that he decides to skewer them too. He points out, "You're here too."

Perona waves a hand dismissively, "Yes, but at least I don't look like several mountains fell on top of me first. You probably did something stupid to get in trouble. I'm just an innocent victim of circumstance."

Zoro shrugs and checks his fish, "Can't deny that. But I don't regret it."

She is quiet for a couple minutes. He suspects her silence may have had more to do with a horrified fascination at his methods of cooking, rather than any interest in the story.

Whatever works he supposes.

He turns the fish until they start to turn black on the outside. The potatoes still feel hard so he sticks them closer to the fire.

When she starts to look restless he asks, "What about you? How did you end up following Moria?"

She hums, pleased that he asked, "He punished the people who killed my family."

When Zoro jerks his head up to look at her, there is a humorless smile on her face, she seems satisfied that she surprised him with such a flat statement of something like that. "Pirates?" He asks, "Marines?"

The look she gives him lets him know she's looking forward to shocking him again, "Rebels."

She pauses to let that sink in, "It was one of Moria's first jobs as a warlord. When I was eight, the peasants on my island invaded our palace and killed my parents and two older brothers."

"I got away because of Kumashi. This guard grabbed me just as I was about to get into the secret tunnels under the castle. He bit the man on the leg and wouldn't let go even though he was only half grown. The last thing I saw before I escaped was that traitorous guard running my dear Kumashi through with his sword." Her voice gets quieter as she talks, until she looks up with a glare to yell at him, "So don't insult him anymore!"

Zoro is sorely tempted to point out that whatever poor shadow was animating that sad mish mash of cloth and zombifed bear, it had nothing to do with the loyal creature that saved her life. But she has to be aware of this and clearly does not care.

"I spent a week hiding in the family crypts." Several ghosts spiral around her as she talks, "I found my devil fruit there, a pumpkin all covered in spirals. I was so hungry I ate it even though it looked weird and tasted awful."

"A couple days after that, I was just learning to use my ghosts when I noticed a commotion in the city's main square."

"Three dozen rebels stood on a scaffold with a man over twenty feet tall standing next to it. As I watched, he executed half of them and the other half had their shadows taken so the corpses could be reanimated. Moria made them clean up the mess they had made of the town. He told the crowd it was justice for disturbing the World Government's Peace."

"It was satisfying to see how they didn't dare argue with him," she smiles vindictively at the memory.

Zoro should have known better then to ask for any kind of story having to do with that creepy crew when he was planning on eating anytime soon…like in the next week.

Her voice regains its aggrieved edge, "Except then the World Government sent my _aunt_ to rule till I reached my majority." She pronounces 'aunt' like a curse.

"The day after she arrived I heard her offering Moria a reward if he used his power to make me disappear."

"Moria refused. He said it was too much trouble."

"So, I followed him to the edge of town and showed him my power. He agreed it was useful enough to make it worthwhile to keep me around."

Zoro is trying to decide what possible response he could give to such a story, when she starts up again.

"So, the story had a happy ending," She waxes nostalgic, "For fifteen years I had loyal servants who I knew would never betray me and who would do anything for me."

"And then _you lot_ showed up," She looks as though she's expecting an apology now that she has more fully explained the situation. Even though, obviously, her side had started it.

They stare at each other in silence, Perona's smugness sliding back into irritation. Her ghosts are starting to circle more closely around her.

The smell of burning meant prompts him to break eye contact to inspect one of the skewers. The fish is slightly burned on the outside, but still raw in the middle.

Zoro finally comes up with an out to this conversation.

He moves to take a bite and is stopped by a squeal of denial from Perona, "I've already watched the ship wreck, I don't need to see the aftermath too!"

As she turns to leave he hears her mutter, "I never thought I would be so grateful for canned soup."

As she glides off over the trees, he considers the fish some more, then braces himself and takes a bite.

It's edible, he insists to himself, which is all he was aiming for. He does his best to ignore how it's not so much 'crunchy' as 'gritty.'

Somewhere the hairs on the back of the ero-cook's neck are standing on end. He chuckles before briefly wondering if Luffy and Sanji were able to get the others away safely. He has to believe that they did. They will either be there at Sabaody or have left him a message.

He works on swallowing what he's cooked and tries to think of some more clever solution for dealing with the ghost witch.

Robin would find a way to make her too afraid to attack, even without knowing where she is hiding. Nami would pretend to be friendly until she found some leverage. Brook would have found a way to make Pinky not _want_ to attack him anymore.

But subtlety was never his strong point.

He eventually gets impatient with the potatoes and eats them even though they are still pretty crunchy. He's got more looking around to do.

* * *

Zoro wanders through trees, ruins, and more trees. It's not a very interesting day, but as he passes more and more ruined buildings and moldering skeletons he comes to realize that this island is harboring a significant threat.

All the evidence of battles indicates fighting with relatively small scale armament and melee weapons. The people here were not killed by something like a massive navy bombardment. It was a local war.

However, people don't usually fight themselves to complete extinction. At some point, either one side defeats the other or, if the match is too even, the hot heads all get killed and everyone else gets sick of the bloodshed at least long enough to lick their wounds and regroup. But he hasn't seen any sign of a single living native. Somehow, all sides were utterly wiped out.

It has to be the ape creatures that he saw last night. If they finished off the human population here there must be more of them and they are not a trivial threat. The ghost witch had seen signs of them, but not clearly. So maybe the interesting stuff will happen again come evening.

Well, he's gotten in the habit of being a night owl.

 _While sailing too many things can happen in a matter of moments, especially on the Grand Line, so someone always has to be awake. They had had a watch schedule at first, but with such a small crew everyone's rest cycles were being thrown into complete disarray. Zoro could see it was slowing everyone down._

 _He told them one evening over dinner that he had decided to do his training at night after everyone else had gone to bed, so they wouldn't be getting in his way all the time._

 _Luffy had laughed like Zoro had done something clever. Nami had looked relieved and approving. Usopp had furrowed his brow, as if wondering if he should object. And of course, the cook had huffed out a puff of smoke with a nonchalant, 'moron.' But they all agreed, in the end, to let him have his way, since he would do what he wanted in any case._

 _So he performed his training and exercises late at night and kept an eye out. Sometimes he would stomp on Nami's bedroom hatch and ask her to look at something on the horizon. Usually, she would either look at him like she suspected him of pranking her or she would instruct him to adjust the sails. Occasionally, her hair would stand on end and she would scramble over, slam open the hatch to men's bunkroom, and scream at them to get their asses on deck pronto._

 _When they entered the Grand Line things became unpredictable enough that Nami declared they needed at least two people awake at all times. So Usopp, Chopper, or Franky would usually be puttering around on deck in the early hours of the night. And then Sanji, Robin, or Brook would rise early to let them go to bed._

 _If things stayed calm, Zoro would start to wrap up whatever he was doing when the cook slouched out onto the deck to smoke his first cigarette of the day while looking out over the railing. Recently, this routine had incorporated their musician greeting the long denied sunrise with cheerful music and nonsensical lyrics._

 _If there was anything to say about what he had seen, something strange, but of unknown significance, he would comment on it in the cook's general direction. If not, he would simply say, 'nothing happened.' The cook would respond with a few words or just nod, usually without turning around, and Zoro would go nap for a few hours till breakfast was ready._

 _When the Sunny had been built, Franky had set up the crow's nest so he could train and watch more easily, but the basic routine hadn't changed._

He shakes himself out his reflection. They are strong, they have to be okay. He'll get back to them. It's just his mind essentially complaining that this was not where he's supposed to be or how he should be spending his time.

No point to it.

"So what about the rest of them?"

He jerks and turns to see the pink witch hovering just a few feet away and slightly above him.

She leans forward and demands, "Tell me about one of your other crewmates. They all seemed pretty weird. I bet you have plenty of good stories about them."

Zoro hesitates, his own story was his to share, but he doesn't really want to talk about the others to her.

He feels very clever when he thinks to ask, "What about you? I bet your crewmates gave you all kinds of problems."

The way she lights up, he can tell there's not going to be any problem keeping her going on this topic.

"Definitely. Absalom, the pervert with the invisibility fruit, he used to try and peep on me in the baths all the time."

Her voice takes on an edge of remembered frustration, "When I used my hollows to flush him out, Moria forbade me from killing him for some reason. I don't know why, he was hardly good for anything, mostly just Hogback's pet test subject." She eyes him condescendingly, "All muscle and no brains."

Zoro gives her a bored look. Perona rolls her eyes and continues her story.

"I had just gotten this new pink warthog to add to my collection. Absalom came by to pester me about something and my new pet interrupted us so she could drool over the moron."

She looks smug, "He never did figure out I was the one who ordered her to pursue her interest in him. Watching him run screaming around the castle with a wedding gown clad zombie in hot pursuit almost made up for what a pain in the ass he was the rest of the time."

There is a glint in her eye that speaks of satisfied vengeance to an intolerable situation.

Zoro catches himself smiling at her story.

 _Not long after their return to the ship the ero-cook had thrown himself at their navigator's feet in a fit of despondency and guilt, "Nami-saaan, I'm so sorry I let that cat bastard take you away a second time. I'm so glad you're okay my darling."_

 _Nami had looked down at him for a minute, her expression difficult to read, "You know if you hadn't said anything, I never would have known. I'm not sure I'm glad you told me."_

 _Zoro had never gotten the chance to ask why the cook had come back without the navigator, "Good job idiot, you were literally on fire when you left Franky and me and you still got your ass kicked?"_

 _Sanji had gone from black despair on the floor to in Zoro's face full of fiery rage in half a second, "What was that Marimo?!"_

" _You always talk about protecting your precious 'Nami-san' but when it came down to it you –"_

 _Zoro had been abruptly cut off as the woman in question gripped the back of his and the swirly-idiot's heads and slammed them together with that bizarre force she could sometimes muster._

 _As they had both fallen to their knees clutching their foreheads the sea witch had declared, "I ended up saving myself. So as far as I'm concerned you all owe me for not protecting my sweet, innocent person."_

 _Zoro had started to protest over, the ero-idiot's cooing agreement, but Nami had cut him off with a glare, "Apologies will be accepted in the form of jewelry or high quality booze. Understood?"_

 _He had called her a greedy witch and Sanji had gotten riled up again, but a request for a snack from Nami had sent the idiot spinning off and stopped things from escalating again._

 _He had bought some citrusy flavored stuff he thought she'd like when he'd picked up his own bottles at Sabaody. It had been lost at some point during what had become a very long afternoon._

He looks up at the ghost witch and allows some vindictive amusement into his voice, "I mostly heard about the cat pervert second hand, but it's nice to know the bastard wasn't getting everything his way before we arrived. Must be difficult having a crewmate you can't trust."

She sighs in self-pity at the horrible idiots she is constantly forced to deal with, "Hogback was just as bad. He was always muttering about how he could put my 'parts' to better use if he were allowed."

She tisks irritation, " _As if_. I ordered his pet Cindry to tell the arrogant doctor what she really thought of him. He was always going on about his misunderstood genius, it was funny watching him freak out every time she put him down."

Zoro hadn't really seen the sadistic doctor either, but Chopper had obviously been deeply disturbed by the actions of his fallen hero.

 _A couple days out to sea from Thriller Bark he had come across his currently little crewmate sitting toward the back of the Sunny, legs sticking through the railing, and a small stack of his medical journals by his side._

 _He had had one of the thick books open in his lap, a set of pages grasped in his fore hoof. It was clear he was preparing to tear them out and throw them into the sea._

 _Zoro sat down cross legged next to the doctor, some part of him always ready for quick dive when the devil fruit users started hanging over the railings._

 _Chopper continued to look down at the pages with a furrowed brow and wet eyes, "I feel dirty for even having read these articles. How could a person have so much talent and use it in such an awful way?"_

 _Zoro had considered the question for a minute, "Did you try the stuff in those books just because he did it?"_

 _The little reindeer had looked up at him, wrinkling his nose in mild irritation, like he thought Zoro was making light of the situation, "Nooo, but it makes me wonder about the motivation behind suggesting these methodologies. I mean, they seemed reasonable when I read them before, but now…I don't know. The wellbeing of the patient was clearly not a factor for him."_

 _Robin would probably have had something insightful to say about this, he settled for, "We all trust your judgement Chopper. You're way smarter than that clown."_

 _Chopper had wiggled at the compliment before sighing, slamming the journal closed, and dropping it back on the pile, "I'll have to look them over again."_

 _The doctor hadn't seemed happy exactly, but his resolve has returned and, in Zoro's experience, that's a better place to be. The swordsman had rubbed his hand over his crewmate's cherished pink hat in reassurance and the kid had giggled and swatted his hand away._

 _Then he'd picked up his journals and returned to the library._

 _It always amazes Zoro that stating the obvious so often seemed to have such a galvanizing effect on others._

What had the pink witch been saying again? "Between the two of them, I'm surprised you could sleep at night."

Perona sniffs in contempt at his implied pity and crosses her arms. Her voice becomes stern, "Don't get me wrong. It's only natural they took what they wanted. Their mistake was thinking they were stronger or cleverer then me."

Zoro reminds himself who he's dealing with: a member of a crew that had had only four actual members, all of them deeply disturbing.

He starts walking again. Perona is on a roll now and it only requires an occasional grunt from him for her to keep up her chatting until she decides she's hungry and glides off back toward the palace.

He decides to climb another tree and take a nap. The monkeys can probably climb too, but this will make it harder for them to sneak up or gang up on him.

When the sun gets lower, he'll find whoever has taken Wado Ichimonji and Shusui.

* * *

 _ **If anyone is curious:**_  
 _ **\- I based my backstory for Perona off the picture Oda drew of her as a child and the fact that he stated she has been living with Moria since she was very young and sees him as father figure.**_  
 _ **\- The whole thing with Zoro being night watch is based off Oda's statements about the crew's sleeping schedules in SBS vol 74. Zoro stays up till 4 am, only sleeps a few hours in the morning and then naps through out the day. He also said two people are on watch at all times. I left Nami off the watch rotation because I figure she could be called on to navigate at any hour and she could and would make an argument for that being her fair share.**_


	3. Chapter 3

Zoro dozes for a few hours, dropping out of the tree as the washed out light of the over cast sky is fading into the eerie red glow that seems to come from somewhere within the clouds.

He starts wandering again, keeping his ears open, and occasionally glimpsing nocturnal wildlife skulking in the trees or gliding through the air.

After a couple hours of only occasionally spotting larger shadows, he finally comes in range of another battle. The creatures are not quiet, they howl and scream and the clash of their weapons carries a long way.

He follows the sound to another break in the trees. There's around forty of the hunched, long faced creatures split about evenly on opposite sides of the small field. A leader at the front on each group is waving their weapon and howling, backed up by the stomping and clanging of their followers.

He walks onto the edge of the field coming up beside one of the two groups, trying to see if he can spot either of his missing swords.

When one of the creatures finally notices Zoro, he quickly elbows one of his comrades, and a wave of jostling and confused hooting passes through the group, followed by silence.

The lead monkey turns to see what's going on.

Zoro's lack of concern over being the center of attention for some twenty apes, each half again his weight or more and armed to the teeth, is far more insulting then whatever their opponent had just been screeching.

The leader points and howls in outrage and the mob obediently charges.

Zoro grins at the possibility of a challenge as he draws Sandai Kitetsu.

Things inside him quickly start pulling and protesting as he blocks their relatively clumsy but forceful strikes.

He's not as fast as he would like to be, but still after a few minutes of bloody but predictable fighting, the last of the followers collapses. Only a few scratches worse for wear.

This doesn't deter the leader who steps forward with bared fangs, growling a challenge. The monkey is carrying a saber, a slightly curved, single edged sword, not too far from a katana in appearance and method of use.

And then something strange happens. As Zoro watches, the creature takes up a stance that the swordsman easily recognizes and his face goes contemptuous and cold. Zoro wonders if he's being mocked.

The creature charges and Zoro lifts his blade to engage. He takes his time to test this one a bit. There is something going on here that he needs to figure out.

After a few exchanges it is obvious, the creature really is mocking or, rather, mimicking him. The attacks are not precise, but still far better than should be possible from just a few minutes of seeing him fight.

And as they clash the ape is continuing to change its style.

Then the beast shows him a sadistic, fang filled grin, tilting his head so his heavy brow shadows his beady eyes.

Zoro's eyes widen and he disengages for a second so he can mentally kick himself. He's letting a monkey play mind games with him.

This creature thinks a few stolen techniques are going to make the difference?

The monkey seems to sense the change in Zoro's attitude, drawing himself up.

There's a few moments pause as they study each other. The leader starts his charge a heartbeat after Zoro. There is a single clash of metal, followed by a brief grating sound as the swords slide past each other.

Zoro flicks the blood off his sword and turns to examine the group on the other side of the field as his opponent falls to the ground behind him.

The other side's leader is carrying a sword and buckler and seems kind of on the short side for a killer monkey, only about the same size as Zoro.

They have crossed their arms and are tapping a long hand like foot, irritated by the interruption to their engagement. Zoro has not seen either of his katana and the mob on the other side doesn't look promising, but he's not going to turn his back on them.

When the second leader sees he has finished off their opponents, they open their mouth wide, bearing their fangs and screeching while clashing their weapons together in anticipation of finally being able to get started. Zoro grins back.

A massive group howl mixed with the clatter of weapons signals the charge and the start of round two.

It wasn't just the leader of this second group, they have all been watching him. Many of them are not using swords of the correct type, but he can still see the effect. There is familiarity in their footing and the way their weapons are held. The longer he fights them, the more obvious it becomes.

He doesn't want to see these creatures mocking anymore of his fighting style then he has to. There is pain building in his ribs, but he focuses on keeping his movements efficient and direct.

It's taking him a little longer to work through this group… but it's not hard

… just a matter of endurance

…No problem.

They spread out as he's fighting them, partially surrounding him. Despite imitating him, they don't seem to have any qualms about attacking more than one at a time.

He has four sets of weapons braced across Sandai Kitetsu when the mini hollows show up.

There's a series of explosions and the lesser monkeys scatter, howling in fear, leaving him just the leader to deal with. He feels a flash of relief, then irritation that he was relieved.

He would have handled it given a few more minutes.

The leader bares their teeth in defiance, but is clearly hesitating after the abrupt loss of their followers.

"Come on Tiny, let's finish this up."

The monkey shows a fang at the nickname. They bang their blade and shield together and point their blade at his head while making a noise in the back of their throat. Zoro gets the distinct impression he has just been insulted.

The monkey charges, but after only a few more strikes Sandai Kitetsu shears off their blade and shatters the shield they are carrying, the beast clutches its bloodied forearm and growls watching him wearily.

"You know you're beaten. None of the half rusted weapons on this island are going to hold up to a proper blade."

The growling trails off and they stare at him, as if in thought, before turning and using three limbs to retreat into the trees.

When Zoro looks around there's a hollow hovering at the edge of the clearing. He stares at the apparition as shakes the blood from Sandai Kitetsu and sheathes the weapon. It makes no move towards him.

He knows the pink witch can see whatever these ghosts see. They stand there staring at each other until Zoro starts to feel absurd.

He turns and heads out of the clearing away from the ghost.

He walks for a few minutes unsure what to think. Though it hadn't been needed, it seemed like she had been trying to be helpful. Still, something about her interference has left him feeling more uneasy then grateful. He wishes again that he were dealing with nearly anyone else.

Then he steps out onto a wide, deteriorating road and sees the castle's silhouette not too far away. When he looks the other way, there are a couple of ghosts hovering around near a bend in the road. And one more behind him through the trees.

He realizes that while he was walking he had occasionally glimpsed ghosts through the trees and adjusted course to avoid them without giving it much thought, since he wasn't headed anywhere in particular. He berates himself for not realizing what Pinky was doing.

Well, one thing he knows for sure is that there aren't any monkeys in the castle. He starts across the road, intending to head back into the trees and away from the large building.

Predictably, he hears the chant start up behind him, 'Neg-a-tive, Neg-a-tive.'

He turns around and faces the creeping ghost, "It was a mistake talking to you if it made you think I would put up with you herding me around."

He waits to see if this will have any effect. All signs indicate she is pestering him out of boredom. She'll probably be just as happy watching him grovel. It irritates him to no end that he hasn't figured out how to deny her that entertainment yet.

The ghost starts to sweep forward again and Zoro drops into seiza, folding his legs beneath himself, and clenches his jaw. Back straight. Remain silent. It will pass.

 _He's so dumb he let her trick him into coming this far. He already compromised his pride by talking to her. Who's he kidding, thinking he has a choice._ "I should be reborn as a spitz."

He grits his jaw in frustration that the idiotic words keep slipping past before he can make them stop. A failure.

He props himself up and focuses on getting his breathing under control.

After a couple minutes he hears a disdainful sniff and looks up to see the pink witch hovering impatiently over him again, looking thoroughly put out, "You are so melodramatic, I was trying to get you back to the castle so you could clean up. You look like a disaster. Am I supposed to beg you to let me help?"

"You could have just _asked_."

"I shouldn't have to ask. I've helped you when I didn't have to, you should show your gratitude by doing what I want without _making me_ threaten you."

He opens his eyes and tries to keep his expression as disinterested as possible. He doesn't even know how to parse what is going through his head right now. Rage is definitely a part of it, but it's mixed with a lot of other things that he would never show to an enemy. It would definitely sound too much like begging.

Blood in the water to someone like her.

His lack of remorse is enough to set her off anyway, "Well, if you're going to go back to being like this. I don't see what reason I have to play nice." A ghost starts to slide over her shoulder.

Nami and Chopper had felt what he is feeling; he had seen flashes of it in their eyes as they spoke of what had happened on that zombie haunted ship, "You are exactly like your crewmates, Perona."

Despite her earlier dismissal of their behavior, it doesn't surprise him that this comment causes her flat, round eyes to bug out in rage.

She hits him with four ghosts one right after another.

For some indeterminate amount of time his mind is blank even of self-hating words. There is just the ground grinding into his forehead and his fingers clawing at his scalp to distract from the feeling of being so empty he might turn inside out and disappear.

 _He is offensively stubborn and troublesome. He has no right to demand anything from anyone. He should be grateful she wants his company. He doesn't deserve her attention. Or anyone's. He shouldn't be taking up space here._ "I should crawl under a rock."

The desire to hide is strong enough that he starts to move, something between a crawl and a stumble, with the vague notion of getting out of sight.

A thought rises up in warning: He will come after you. They will all come after you.

This thought spikes his confused brain into a panic and as he reaches the edge of the road he trips on nothing and tumbles down the small shoulder into weedy grass, sprawling on his back.

He forgets that he is nowhere near the rest of the crew and tries to come up with a way to prevent running into them. He doesn't want to see them. Not like this.

But he has seen it with his own eyes. Through betrayal, denial, and to the very gates of hell, Luffy is relentless. Zoro rolls over and gets his feet under him so he can continue stumbling deeper into the trees lining the edges of the road.

He distantly hears Perona cackling from above and behind him. About the time he would be disappearing into the trees, she calls after him with false cheer, "So sorry I tried to help. Have fun dying in the woods."

He keeps moving forward. Slowly the frantic feeling subsides and his feet steady under him.

At first, still confused, his panic fades to resignation. If he runs he will only give Luffy the trouble of chasing him.

He slows and when he comes to a steep, rocky bluff. He slumps down on the remains of a wall rather than deal with it.

Slowly his funk fades to internal quiet. He realizes he's been staring at the pine branches slowly swaying in the cool night breeze for long enough that the sky is starting to lighten up, making them easier to see.

The nonsensical song Brook always plays when he comes out on deck first thing in the morning is circling through his head.

 _His crewmate had endured living in an eternal fog, surrounded by nothing but the memories of everything he had lost for more than twice the time that Zoro has even been alive. But he is still strong enough to laugh, even at the absurdity of his own existence._

 _Not too long ago, Zoro had nearly caught himself yelling, 'We get it! You're an eight foot tall living skeleton! Nobody cares!' And just that one time, he had started laughing at Brook's endless bad puns because he finally understood how clever the musician actually is to turn something that can't be over looked into something not worth paying attention to._

Zoro takes a deep breath, as though he just woke up, and smiles.

His dread that Luffy would come after him, even if he doesn't deserve it, turns around into hope.

It's something even Perona's power can't touch.

His resolution to never do anything that would give him cause for regret, which has seen him through everything else, cannot stand in the face of ghosts that fill every choice with the certainty of catastrophe.

But Luffy trusts his crew, not only to be loyal, but also to find a way to accomplish any task set before them. He pours every ounce of himself into accomplishing his goals and takes it for granted that his friends will do the same.

Even a futile gesture would be better than doing nothing in the face of that faith.

If he cannot stand up straight for himself, maybe he can do it for his captain.

He stifles his reluctance to lean on someone else in this way. It is a far smaller blow to his pride then allowing the ghost witch to keep making him grovel.

When he looks back toward the bluff he notices a human size crack in the rock conveniently screened on this side by the wall and on the other by a dense clump of pine trees.

He rousts himself enough to shove some dry pine needles into the crack, then collapses on top of the pile and sleeps until its nearly dark again.

* * *

Zoro spends several nights wandering around without making any progress. He runs across a few more skirmishes and a maybe a dozen bands patrolling around, but none of them have his weapons.

He's noticed that the weaker members of each group tend to scatter and it's become obvious that they are fleeing to other groups and spreading what they've seen. He's seen far too many half assed imitations of his single blade techniques mixed in with everything else over the last few nights.

He decides to take this as an opportunity to refine his basics. He's doesn't know if these creatures _could_ pick up steel cutting or flying slash attacks and he doesn't want to find out. Techniques like that shouldn't be given to those who have no discipline. He's seen too many idiots level half a forest, or worse a city street, with their flashy sloppiness. A true swordsman cuts only what he means to cut and nothing more.

However, what the monkeys lack in technical proficiency, they make up in speed and strength.

He tells himself fighting while injured will only make him that much better once he is back in top condition.

An image of his crew's doctor turning large and lunging at him flashes through Zoro's mind, but what Chopper doesn't know, he won't need to lecture Zoro about…Although, apparently now he's heard the doctor's complaints enough that his own imagination can fill in for the reindeer's absence… Damn it.

* * *

Three days since he last saw Perona he wakes up while it's still a couple hours before sunset and decides to start his searching a little early. He's getting impatient that he hasn't found the edge of the island yet, he's not sure if it's really big or if they are near the middle. He decides to walk downhill because that's where the most water would be.

He finds himself at the base of one those mountains that seem to curl in on themselves. He discovers that they only look this way because they are covered in massive vines that warp around each other and the hill so thickly that they are supporting some of the ubiquitous pine trees near the top.

He only cares about this new information because it emphasizes that he has never been here before and he's pretty sure the mountains would not be in the direction of the harbor.

He heads back the way he came.

A short while later he comes to the top of a small rise and sees a couple of the castle's towers through the gaps in the trees.

He drops his head back, growls in frustration and veers off in another direction.

A few minutes later he sees a humanoid shape drop out of a nearby tree and quickly knuckle walk away.

He comes to the edge of a large clearing; squarish stones have been lined up more or less evenly to make a sort of aisle.

There are various monkeys gathered around the edges of the clearing. They peer from behind trunks or perch in the lower branches watching.

At the far end of the aisle of stones, a pile of rocks has been set up in a half bowl shape and decorated with whatever shiny things the creatures could lay hands on.

A monkey twice Zoro's height is lounging on the makeshift throne. He's wearing gold bracelets and chains as well as bits of dress armor that aren't anywhere near big enough to actually protect him. It's all topped off with a red cape that was probably once a set of curtains.

Flanking the leader's chair are two others, only slightly smaller, wearing less jewelry and more armor.

Shusui is wedged between two of the stones near the leader's paw.

Zoro grins in a way that would send an animal with proper instincts of self-preservation or a human with any common sense running. These creatures don't seem to have either of those things though.

He is hungry, exhausted, and still recovering from injuries that nearly ended his life, but the path lies straight before him, so he will reach the other end of it.

The two guards advance. They are carrying spears, as they approach its clear their style is more suited to intimidation then actual combat. They picked the wrong people to imitate.

Behind them the king monkey picks up Shusui and lays it across his knees. His hand covers the entire hilt of the blade. He leans forward and gives Zoro a full fanged grin.

As Zoro comes within striking distance of the spears, he lunges forward and cuts through the staves just below the spearheads and follows through with a blow to the back of the head for each of them.

By the time the second monkey starts to fall he has to bring Sandai Kitetsu around to block Shusui.

If the big monkey is taken aback by the speed with which his guards have fallen, he shows no sign of it.

Zoro uses some of Kuina's deflection techniques to avoid shattering Sandai Kitetsu in the bind. He's hoping to flip his opponent on his back, but the creature turns Shusui so that their swords disengage before he can make the lock.

This brings them almost shoulder to shoulder with each other, facing in opposite directions. Zoro tries to twist and strike at his opponent's side, but Shusui is already there blocking and coming around to try and gut him in turn.

They end up circling around the clearing. The quick motion required to deflect the giant's strikes has caused the wound shot clean through his shoulder by Admiral Kizaru on Sabaody to start bleeding again.

This in turn slows him down enough that some of his force deflections are not clean as he would like. He can hear stiches popping occasionally.

In turn, He lands several gashes on his oversized opponent's sides and arms. They are bleeding freely, but that doesn't seem to bother the monkey much yet.

All that matters is that Zoro is going to get his sword back. He can feel the scale ready to tip one way or the other.

They break apart and Zoro sets his stance, both hands on Sandai Kitetsu for the final strike.

Maybe it's all the blood loss but, he swears he hears someone call his name behind him. It's not Perona.

He quickly shifts and turns sideways.

Tiny, the undersized leader from a few nights ago, is standing directly behind him, arm outstretched so that their hand would be touching his right kidney if he hadn't turned just then. They do not bare their teeth at him or make any noise at all as they rotate their wrist and try to cut through his spine.

Zoro twists in time to block the relatively weak impromptu strike. And then grins when he sees what the newcomer is holding.

Wado Ichimonji covered in dried blood, but intact.

Step one is finally about to be completed.

Something has shifted again and his opponents can feel it. The big one howls in challenge, swings Shusui irritably in their direction, and stamps his feet. The smaller one glances over, and then returns their attention to Zoro, dismissive of whatever the big one is saying.

Zoro backs off a few paces so he can keep both his opponents in sight.

He's realized over the last few days that the ones that are only slightly larger than him, with the duller facial markings and smaller fangs are female. Most of them seem content to watch, but he's seen a few here and there involved in the fighting. Tiny is the only one he's seen leading though.

Seeing her holding Wado Ichimonji is somehow funny and infuriating at the same time, like someone is making a bad joke at his expense. Again.

In response to whatever shows on his face, her lips curl back in snarl showing all the teeth in her long muzzle.

The one holding Shusui finishes off his tirade with a final deep growl and charges the new comer with a two handed slash. She turns and the two blades meet near their hilts with a loud clash and scrape.

Tiny slides back, her long toed feet digging grooves into the ground.

She disengages before the other can fully make use of his greater strength and jumps up, pushing off his hand, so she is standing with one foot on his shoulder and one on the helmet sitting on his head.

She pushes the helmet forward over his eyes and proceeds to bludgeon him repeatedly over the head with the back of the blade, ringing his helmet like a bell.

The king monkey is screeching and flailing as he makes a couple swipes at her, but she just ducks under them while keeping her balance and grinning evilly the whole time.

When he starts to stumble, she pulls back and drives the Wado Ichimonji down into the join of his neck, through a gap in the bone, spearing his heart.

He abruptly goes silent and keels over face down in the dirt, blood pooling rapidly out of that one precise wound.

There are some shrieks of alarm from the trees, but none of the spectators leave their perches.

Zoro focuses on the opponent in front of him and tries not to feel that he has lost control of the situation as he is cheered on and heckled by monkeys.

She looks over as if assessing him. Then, with a slight contemptuous bearing of her fangs, she points Wado Ichimonji at his shoulder and side where blood has seeped through his bandages from reopened wounds while hooting derisively at him.

Even if he hadn't been through this scenario so many times before, he would still know what she is indicating.

He lifts Sandai Kitetsu and straightens his stance, "Don't worry about it. That blade you're holding, Wado Ichimonji, is mine. She deserves better than a master who doesn't care for her properly."

She snorts and waves the sword at him, clearly unimpressed by his claim. He smirks at his new opponent, "Well come on then."

The monkey is fast and she keeps disengaging before they can get locked into contest of strength. He focuses on defending and starts circling around.

He is almost to his goal when she changes tactics, pushing forward instead of disengaging. At the same time he feels a sudden jerk on his leg. As he starts to fall backward, he realizes that she's unbalanced him by using her foot to grab pant leg.

He rolls with the fall, bringing his foot up to her sternum as she tries to lunge at him and throwing her over his head as he lands on his back.

Wado Ichimonji causes his earrings to rattle as he jerks his head sideways to avoid getting stabbed through the eye.

However, the blade continues its arc into his shoulder where it nicks his collar bone before he completes his kick and sends her flying with an outraged screech into one of the nearby pine trees hard enough to shake out several of the spectators.

He completes the roll over his shoulders and flips back up onto his feet.

As she gets her feet back under her, growling in irritation, he quickly steps over to the fallen gold decked male and picks up Shusui from where it had fallen just beyond its usurper's reach.

He grins as he settles the sword's weight in his left hand and Sandai Kitetsu in his right. One sword style always was his least favorite.

"Ok, you are by far the most interesting one I've fought so far, but I have places to be, so let's finish this up." He watches as she squares up and places both hands on Wado Ichimonji.

He then sheathes Sandai Kitetsu and turns Shusui so it is pointing behind him on his other side, where it would be if he had the saya on him.

He feels as much as hears the growl that comes from his opponent at that. She thinks she is being insulted.

Zoro crouches slightly griping both swords firmly, "You'd better take this charge seriously or you'll regret it."

At that the growling stops. Several seconds of intent silence pass, then a mutual charge faster than any of those watching can follow.

"Rashomon!"

There is a spray of blood and, as his opponent falls to the ground, the white hilted sword falls from her grasp to land point down in the trampled earth, humming quietly from the strike.

He sheaths Sandai Kitetsu and quickly moves to pull Wado Ichimonji from the ground so that he can inspect the blade more closely. He retrieves both swords' saya from his two opponents.

As Zoro wanders out of the clearing, he inspects his retrieved blades and grimaces at the state they are in. He sits down on a fallen log just outside the clearing, causing several monkeys who were watching from a nearby tree to quietly drop down and slink away.

It's been nearly a week since his swords were taken and it looks like they have seen heavy use and very little care. He unwraps the last of the bandages from around his chest, pulls out the bits that are clean enough and starts scrubbing the collected filth off the white hilted blade.

Once he's cleaned both swords as best he can, he levers himself to his feet and looks around. He wants to take a nap, but first he should get further away from the castle.

* * *

A few minutes later he is surprised to find himself stepping onto the edge of a ruined courtyard. When he looks up, the back of the old palace is towering over him. He scowls in confusion.

A small 'che' of irritation draws his attention closer to the castle. Perona is sitting on a veranda messing with something in her lap. She must be physically out here for that.

When he walks closer he can see that she's got some kind of stuffed animal in her lap. It looks like a combination of a pig and a chicken and she seems to be stitching a goatee onto the space under its beak.

"What the hell is that?"

Perona startles, jumping up as a ghost rears up over her shoulder.

However, when she sees his relatively relaxed stance, she hesitates and then starts to look annoyed, "You manage to sneak up on me and this is what you decide to do? Ask stupid questions?"

He points at the oddity sitting in her lap, "It's a perfectly reasonable question. That thing is creepy looking."

She covers the plushes' ears, "Don't make fun of Pig Feather…and that's not the point!"

She seems to struggle with what she wants to say for a few seconds, before deflating in frustration, "You probably just wasted the only time you're going have an advantage over me."

And that annoys her? "Do you _want_ to fight me?" He rests a hand on top of Shusui hilt and grins at her, "I'm fine with that, just promise you won't hold a grudge about the outcome."

The ghost drifts upward, but the way she rolls of her eyes indicates she is aware he is more taunting then threatening her, "No, I don't want to fight you! I hate fighting! That's what minions are for."

They stare at each other for another minute before he decides neither of them is getting anything out of this conversation and turns to go, "Ok, well I finally found my swords so when I get to the coast I'll be done with this damn island."

She starts giggling, "Horohorohoro, You're never going to make it _there_."

He turns back toward her, returning his hand to his swords.

This time the look on his face causes her to take a step back before she remembers to gather her disdain back around herself, "I'm not going to _stop_ you, but it's difficult to get in the way of something that's already impossible."

At his irritated, "Eeehhhh?" She elaborates, "You've been walking for five days and you've somehow managed to entirely avoid the coast, which is only a few miles away. Here's a hint, if you keep turning in the same direction you go in a circle."

Zoro grits his teeth; he had _not_ been doing that, "I don't know how anyone could find their way around here, all the trees and rocks look the same."

The pink witch has the nerve to start laughing at him again, not just a little snickering either, full on belly laughs.

She continues for far longer he thinks is reasonable, especially since he was being serious. He turns and starts walking toward the edge of the court yard.

Her laughter actually picks up when she sees the direction he's heading, "Where….Where are you going?"

As he walks back across the aisle of squarish stones, he notices all the bodies have been cleared away, leaving trampled grass stained with splashes of blood.

Maybe if he goes around to the front of palace he can find that road again…

Somehow, when he looks around the many towered building is nowhere in sight.

He sighs and starts walking again.

It's well into the night when he notices one of Pinky's hollows trailing him again.

Just the one this time, he eyes it suspiciously, but it's just hovering there, "You know, it's weird just silently following someone around."

The ghost drifts downward slowly for several seconds, before boosting itself back up zipping off.

He's just leaving the remains of a barn where it looks like another troop of monkeys has made their home, though they are out at the moment, when Perona drops down in front of him, "I've decided you're too dumb to be sneaky. If you promise not to attack me, I'll help you rebandage your wounds."

" _I_ don't attack people for no reason and I didn't ask for your help…And I don't need bandages."

"Don't go getting all indignant on me when I've been watching you go psycho face on those monkeys for the last week. And yes you do, you're covered in cuts, some of which need stiches."

"I don't have time for this," he starts looking around trying to decide which way he should go. He came from that way…?

"I'll tell you what, come back to the castle, clean up and tomorrow I'll show you the _Super Secret_ road that leads from the palace to the island's main harbor. Although, as I told you from the beginning, there aren't any boats there. It should be interesting seeing what you do then, I'm sick of watching you walk in circles."

"I'm fine. Let's go now."

"Noooo, you are NOT fine and it's dark right now."

"So, there's still that red light from the clouds," he responds, not wanting to discuss his injuries.

She leans back and studies him with a frown before something occurs to her and she cajoles, "I found a sword cleaning kit, it's got one of those puff ball things, oil, and everything."

Zoro looks up at the pink haired woman floating above him with a couple of her ghosts circling around her. Perona gets impatient, "Do you want it or not?"

He contemplates the sorry state of his blades before giving her a nod, "Okay."

They stare at each other for a few heartbeats before Perona realizes that's all he has to say. Her eyes narrow and her ghosts rear up over her shoulders like snakes.

He rest one hand on his swords and does his best to look impassively back at her. They both know she can torture him, but she can't force him to keep her company. And she's made it obvious she wants his company, though Zoro still doesn't understand why.

Perona tisks, "Would it kill you to makes some small talk? You're So Rude." She crosses her arms, "You've probably never had to deal with anyone you couldn't just bully into getting whatever you want."

Ignoring the massive hypocrisy of that statement, he barks a laugh, "Don't be stupid. You must have seen enough of my crew to know _that's_ not true. A stubborn pain in the ass, every single one of them."

"And yet you're in a huge hurry to get back to them."

"Of course."

"Why!?"

When he just shrugs his shoulders she sighs and turns away with a sulky slump to her shoulders, "You're lucky you're the only other person here."


	4. Chapter 4

Zoro follows Perona the half mile back to the castle, over a partially collapsed wall, and across a dried up garden to a small side door that leads into the kitchen.

Perona drops into her body, which she left sitting on a chair, and gets up retrieve an oblong box out of a cabinet under the kitchen counter.

Zoro points out, "Whoever lives here is probably going to be back soon. They aren't sociable type considering where they've chosen to live. You aren't worried what they're going to do when they see you've been rummaging around and stealing their stuff for weeks now?"

Despite his comment about theft, Zoro takes a cleaning cloth and starts wiping the last of the dirt off Wado Ichimonji. The blade is badly in need of polishing powder before rust sets in.

Perona waves a hand dismissively, "I can handle them. Besides it's not like I have much choice. I can't live like a hobo like you."

When he's done with the white hilted sword and about to start on Shusui, Perona clears her throat and points at a big pot by the stove, "Fill that up with water and boil it."

He looks up and gives her an inquisitive grunt.

She shifts her pointing finger to him and declares, "Yoooou need a bath. Not only are you not at all cute, it's actually kind of scary to look at you. And that's coming from someone who normally hangs around _zombies_."

He considers her demand, then gets up and puts the pot under the pump and starts filling it.

She narrows her eyes at him as if suspecting a trick, "You aren't going to refuse just for the sake of being annoying?"

He responds seriously, "I missed my last two weekly baths, might as well catch up since I'm here anyway." He smiles when she wrinkles her nose.

He stokes up the stove, puts the pot of water on and then continues cleaning the grime off his weapons while waiting for the water to heat up.

Those monkeys often fought like trained warriors, but they didn't seem to know anything about showing proper respect for the tools their lives depended upon. It was a mockery of everything he'd been taught.

He focuses on getting his weapons completely clean and tries not to dwell on why his blades were laying out there in the first place. The metal seems to be fine, although he would like to be able to rewrap the hilts; the cloth has gotten thoroughly stained.

She watches him for a while, then drifts off, and then comes back, not unlike the ghosts he's seen following him all over the island.

He's almost done with Sandai Kitetsu when the pink witch prods, "You're going to be disappointed when we get to the harbor; everything there is as much of a mess as the area around the castle."

"So you said, but I'm not going to get anything done sitting here."

This answer shouldn't surprise her, but it still seems to irk her, "You're not going to get anything done over there either, except probably get more injured."

He lays down his words like bricks, "I don't know what happened to the rest of my crew and they probably don't know what happened to me, but I guarantee each of them is doing their best to find their way back. I won't shame myself by doing any less than they are doing."

This is just another idiocy in her eyes, "What makes you think they will even want you back after you got your ass kicked!?"

Zoro sheaths the last blade and stands up. Anything he could say wouldn't mean anything to her and would be overly sappy for his taste anyway, "Pinky, bring out one of your ghosts."

The ghost witch looks slightly suspicious, but one of her hollows slides over her shoulder and glides over to float a few feet away.

Time to see if his theory is correct. He focuses on keeping his breathing and gait steady as he steps forward into the hollow's translucent body.

Even expecting it, his legs shake as he struggles not to let them buckle under the weight of the futility that comes crashing down on him.

He grinds his teeth and focuses on putting one foot in front of the other.

 _Why_ would _they want you to come back? You're only skilled at one thing and it wasn't enough to protect them. Your only job and you failed._

He stops a few steps past the ghost and is forced to take a few deep breaths before he can make himself straighten up fully and look Perona in the eye. He grasps onto the truth of his words, "I believe it because it's true."

Perona has stepped back a few paces and she now has several small bomb hollows flanking her. She is assessing him with narrowed eyes.

When he makes no further move, she relaxes and let out a snort, "If you're trying to intimidate me you have a ways to go. You look like crap."

Then something else occurs to her, "Wait, what did that have to do with my question? Are you saying your obligation to your crew somehow let you overcome my hollows?"

She studies him, gauging if he's serious, "That's stupid, I've broken up loyal crews before."

Zoro thinks about the Rolling Pirates, and Lola's determination to keep them all alive, "How many of them did you hit with those things over and over? Most of them were probably striped of their shadows and cast back out to sea before they had a chance to figure it out," He smirks at her, "You used the same trick too many times."

She sniffs disdainfully, "I still have an advantage over you."

"But less of one now then you did before and the more you use your hollows the more chances you give me to build up immunity." He tries not to think how exhausting that little test had been.

She considers and then concedes with an air of being very satisfied with her own generosity, "I suppose I can save my hollows for when you're being particularly annoying."

"Or you could just stop using them."

She looks at him like he's the one being unreasonable, "I was just trying to make sure you would be nice to me. It's almost like you want me to attack you, you're so rude all the time."

He's not going to let that slide, "I'm Rude Because You Keep Attacking Me!"

Perona shakes her head, "No, I think that's just how you are."

His eye twitches as he scowls at her, but before he can respond, she continues, "I don't understand how you can endure sleeping in trees, eating charred fish, not to mention all the fighting, but act like such a baby about a few ghosts."

Well, the answer to that is easy, "Murderous monkeys are easier to deal with."

She freezes, and then scowls as she studies him, obviously not happy with what he just said.

He crosses his arms and keeps his expression neutral.

After a few seconds of staring at each other, she lets out an aggravated huff, and changes the subject, "The water is boiling, come on. We need to get you bandaged up so tomorrow you can go injure yourself more."

She has promised nothing. He decides he might as well take a bath and wait to see if anything has actually changed.

As he hauls the pot up the stairs Perona explains, "There's running water, but the hot water stopped working a few days ago for some reason…It's really a shame you aren't useful and know how to fix things."

"Yeah, it'd be great if Usopp were here right now. That would solve a lot of problems." She scowls at him and one of her hollows peeks over her shoulder. He adds, "He's good at cobbling something together, even if there's just junk to work with."

She shows him an upstairs bathroom. He looks around, there's a pile of dirty towels in one corner with a few left on the shelf nearby. The tub has a tap that supplies cold water, as promised. This castle must have a cistern.

He peels his clothes off. His pants and socks are dirty enough to practically stand on their own.

He fills the tub half way with cold water and kneels down to clean off the first layer of grime. The water immediately turns cloudy with dirt and dried blood.

He empties the tub rinses it out and finally pours the hot water in.

* * *

He's woken up suddenly sometime later, flailing a little as a small explosion goes off by his head. Perona calls through the door, "Are you dead in there? I've been pounding on this door forever."

"What's your problem?" He stands up out of the now cold water, gets a towel and starts drying himself off.

"Come get these clothes," she demands through the door.

He buys his clothes for durability and doesn't usually worry too much about how dirty they are, but he knows from experience that if blood sits long enough it starts to smell like rotten meat.

He opens the door with towel around his waist and she shoves a pile of cloth at his chest. He looks down at it, "Where'd you get these?"

She rolls her eyes, "Just get dressed and come down stairs."

There's a pair of pants, socks, underwear, and a shirt. So they're stealing clothes from this guy too.

Oh well. It all looks clean so he puts the stuff on. The pants are cut baggy and a little too long, but he just stuffs them into his boots.

* * *

He's looking down at the shirt in his hand when he enters the kitchen, "There's something wrong with this thing. It fits across the back, but I can't button it up."

She waves her hand from where she is sitting at the table finishing off a bowl of soup, "Don't worry about it, it's a fashion thing."

When he gives her a suspicious look, she wrinkles her nose, "I looked ok. All of the shirts are like that. You can go look yourself if you want." He shrugs, drops the shirt over the back of a chair and goes to see if there's any soup left.

While he's eating, she leaves and comes back a few minutes later to dump a pile of bandages on the table next to him.

"You're not going to mummify me again," he asserts around his last mouthful of food as she goes to one of the cabinets.

She pulls out a first aid kit and plonks it on the table. "I'm going to stich up all those cuts," she points to about six different places on his body while wrinkling her nose, "Then I'll just cover up the places that need it after that."

"Oh yeah, you were sewing …something earlier," he looks around and sees the pig-chicken hybrid sitting on a counter.

She picks up the stuffed creature and hugs it to her chest, "I have to do something to pass the time. I used to make stuffed toys to show Hogback what I wanted him to make for me. All of my friends needed to be cute and Hogback had horrible taste."

A memory of some of the ghost witch's minions flashes unwanted into Zoro's head.

He's not in the habit of commenting on other people's sense of aesthetics. He doesn't comment this time either, but he can feel his face spasm with incredulity before his brain decides to drop the entire subject as not worth trying to sort out, let alone articulate.

She eyes him warningly, but seems satisfied he doesn't actually say anything to criticize her friends/servants. She reaches into the kit and pulls out a needle and suture thread "You're lucky I know how. This is actually the second time I've sewn your hide up you know. Now stay still."

Chopper always insisted on going through this little ritual first …"Don't you need to dip that in alcohol?"

Perona looks down at the needle… "Oh yeah!" She reaches back into the kit…

* * *

Zoro should have seen this coming, an hour and twenty rolls of bandages later; he's covered fingers to neck to waist again. When he growls at her, she crosses her arms and sniffs, "I kept my word, it's not my fault you're such a mess."

He starts to pick at them, but she snorts at him, "What, too _uncomfortable_ for you mister tough guy?"

"I need to be able to move my arms."

She watches him closely and he decides he's done dealing with stuff today, "I'm gonna sleep."

"Wait," she demands. When her turns he looks back at her she holds out her hand, "Take your pants off."

"That's rather abrupt," he says because he knows it will annoy her.

"Stop talking, you idiot. I'm going to hem them."

He hands her the pants around the pantry door and is asleep on the pallet still laying in there thirty seconds later.

* * *

When he starts awake an unknown amount of time later and sees there's a little light coming in through a crack in the door, he pulls on the pants Perona had apparently dumped on his face while he was sleeping and wanders into the kitchen. It seems to be a little after sunrise.

There's got to be something to eat around.

Perona comes down about an hour later to find him fighting a pot of oatmeal for possession of the mixing spoon.

"You didn't put enough water in you idiot."

She attempts to fix it by dumping more water in along with some powdered milk and sugar. She tries to stir it all together, but the spoon is still mired in the oat glue under the layer of cloudy water.

She growls in annoyance and picks up the pot, turning toward the door, "Well this is a lost cause."

Zoro halts her by grabbing the pots handle, "Give me that."

She hands him the pot and spoon, with the air of someone who has had far too little entertainment lately. Ok, this wooden spoon isn't going to cut it. He digs around in the kitchen drawers until he finds a metal thing that looks sturdy enough.

Ten minutes later he's sweating, but he has forced the contents of the pot to combine into something that actually appears edible.

Perona squints at him as he sets the pot down, "I've seen you swing that black sword around like it was nothing."

"yeah?"

"The one that weighs as much as you do, at least"

"Yeah?"

She decides to drop whatever she's getting at, "Why go through all that trouble for a cruddy pot of oats? It would have been easier to start over."

"There's no reason to waste food," he asserts as he takes the now freed spoon and plops some of the mix into a bowl.

"There's like a fifty pound bag of this stuff in the pantry."

Zoro just shrugs and continues to work on his bowl of perfectly serviceable breakfast. Perona rolls her eyes and, after poking experimentally a few times, takes some for herself.

* * *

After breakfast she leaves her body somewhere upstairs and floats down to impatiently wave him out the door.

As they pass through the square with the strange rooted cross Pinky points, "Ok, just follow the road that the left arm of this cross is pointing at and you'll get to the main harbor town. You just keep following the road though to the water's edge."

Ok, Nami taught him a trick for this. He surreptitiously splays his thumbs out to remind himself which one forms an L. He looks at the cross…the L bit is pointing that way. After a few steps he hears a quiet 'oh my god,' then louder, "Over here you idiot!"

Several miles of disused road and the ruins of a large town later, they come to a partially collapsed stone sea wall bordering a harbor. He can see the remains of wooden docks and ships, often scarred with signs of fire, scattered around the edges of water.

He walks back and forth along the wall considering the next step. He looks inside the remains of several buildings nearby, but there's no boat just waiting to be used there either.

So… He needs wood, nails, canvas…tar? Franky was always messing around with the fittings and doing maintenance work on the Sunny, but Zoro had never picked up much besides that Franky was very protective of his masterpiece while also, somehow, never being completely satisfied with it.

Zoro admired that relentless perfectionism, even if he had no understanding of the thing it was directed at.

And that lack of understanding is going to be a problem now. Not to mention once he builds the boat he will have to sail it back to Sabaody without a navigator…and without anyone to watch his back… or help with any of the other ten thousand things necessary to stay alive on the Grand Line.

He catches himself scowling at the prow of a scorched caravel sticking out of the water and looks around suspiciously, but there are no ghosts in sight. Pinky is off in the distance, drifting around looking bored.

Ok, stuff to make a boat. He starts shifting through the debris pulling out anything that looks potentially useful.

When the sun is a bit past its peak, he turns from prying a length of plank from under some rubble to see Pinky hovering over his pile of collected stuff.

As he drops the wood on the pile she looks over at him and scolds, "If you try to sail across the Grand Line in anything you can make out of this junk, you are really, definitely going to die."

What else can he do? Most likely his crewmates don't know where he is. He has to make an effort on his end. He turns and starts scanning the rubble again for a next spot to dig, "Until a better option comes along, this is what I'm doing."

Pinky gets irritated, "Sometimes things seem impossible because they are!"

Zoro walks over to another partially collapsed building and starts digging. He thinks of his childhood rival, now long dead in a pointless accident, and her father, who tried to protect her by crushing her dreams, "Giving up doesn't guarantee stability or even survival."

She seems to take personal offence to that, "Well, I guess we should all just throw ourselves off a cliff then! Maybe we'll find out we can fly!"

Zoro snorts and she sinks slightly in the air as she realizes how that sounds coming from her, "You know what I mean!"

"I don't see what you're getting so worked up about, I'm not asking you to come with me. You concerned Pinky?"

She looks unimpressed, "No, I just want to watch your brain overheat actually trying to think things through for once."

It seems to surprise her when he laughs a little at that, "You keep calling me an idiot –"

"That's because you –"

"But you've been here for several weeks longer then I have _and_ you have the ability to survey the whole island and you haven't come up with a better idea, or any idea at all for that matter."

A couple of her ghosts spiral up around her, but he judges from the fact that her arms are crossed that she isn't actually going to use them. She likes to make a throwing motion when she sends them forward.

She huffs in amused irritation, she should have known to expect this, "You're really good at getting people to regret worrying about you."

He decides not to call her out on her slip, and instead gives her a smirk before turning back to digging.

Another sigh, "Well, I guess we all have to have our hobbies. I'm going to go finish up Pig Feather."

The day is starting to take on the reddish light of evening when Zoro stops his gathering to consider what he should do as he finishes off the food and water he brought with him. There doesn't seem to be much wildlife to hunt in this large stretch of ruins, but if he leaves the area it could be difficult to find his way back.

He gets back to digging. He can go without eating for a day or two.

Pinky's return is signaled by an irritated throat noise, "You've gotten your bandages all dirty. At this rate I'm going to be rewrapping you every day. Even a castle only has so many sheets you know."

When he turns toward where Pinky is hovering over his collected supplies, she points accusingly at his shoulder, "And your shoulder's bleeding again!"

Zoro looks down at the spots and shrugs.

"Come on idiot, it's going to be dark soon."

She starts to fly off, but stops when he calls after her, "You willing to come back here tomorrow?"

She looks amused at this, "Is this you admitting you can't find your way back here on your own?"

Zoro crosses his arms, "I'll just stay here. I don't have time for whatever games you decide to play later on."

Perona points at the pile of scraps, "Tomorrow you're going to assemble all that into a boat?"

"Yes."

"Okay, I'll definitely bring you back. I have to see that." The evasion of boredom does seem to be a big motivator for her, Zoro nods his head.

* * *

She insists he take a bath again and then insists he tear another sheet into strips to restock the bandages.

"I don't know if I should keep stitching this up if you're just going to keep tearing them out," she grouses while pushing the edges of the wound closed.

He cranes his head back to look, "They're mostly still there."

"Ok, hold still then," she proceeds to repair the stiches with quick, forceful jabs while he tries to pretend he's not sweating.

Somehow, he ends up mummified again.

* * *

When Zoro wanders into the kitchen the next morning the light is just fading into morning grey and there is no sign of the ghost witch anywhere. By the time he finishes snacking on some dried fruit and meat he's tired of waiting around and finds his way to the front door.

Yesterday, Perona had said multiple times that 'he just needs to follow the road to the square with the cross and then follow the biggest road out the other side to the harbor.' When he asked her why she kept repeating herself, she just got more irritated for some reason.

It seems to take longer than usual and he could swear the cross is not facing quite the same way, but he eventually finds the square. Zoro is contemplating which direction he should go when he starts feeling like something is off. The occasional clattering and scratches he's hearing are more than can be accounted for by the wind or small animals.

His train of thought is, of course, interrupted, "There you are! For some reason it took forever for my hollows to find you. Do actually bend space? Like when you showed up at random when I was in the courtyard the other day. How did you cover so much ground so quickly? I mean, I checked on you and you were by the mountains, then, like hardly any time later, you had come all the way back to the castle…"

Zoro interrupts her, "You see anything up there, Pinky?"

She glances down at him, gauging if he is serious and then floats higher so she can see over the partially collapsed walls surrounding them. The confused way she looks around indicates she's not seeing anything.

This is unusual, the monkeys don't usually bother with sneaking around…at least not that he'd noticed. Maybe the group is larger than usual. Where the hell are they? What a pain in the ass.

"Just come out already!"

The clattering picks up and Perona makes a surprised 'wah' noise.

A growl draws his attention to a figure crouching atop one of the ruined walls, saber in hand. He grins, "Hey Tiny! Glad to see you made it."

The female monkey responds by baring her fangs. His final strike had scored two nearly symmetrical slashes along her lower ribs. He can see the already mostly wounds peeking out around the edges of her new breast plate.

She keeps her eyes on him as she lets out a deep chested growl and several barks.

Other armed monkeys start appearing on the tops of the walls surrounding them.

Perona makes that annoyed 'che' sound again, "You lot are nowhere near cute enough for me to put up with this nonsense, Shoo." She waves her hands at them like they are chickens and several exploding hollows appear around her.

This causes many of Tiny's followers to shift uneasily, but she growls at them and they stay where they are. The monkey then turns to the ghost witch and curls her upper lip back in a sneer.

Perona smirks and her mini hollows close in and detonate, shrouding the troop's leader in smoke.

"There you see, now get lost," she waves her hands at them again, "we're already on a pointless errand and you're making it take longer than it should."

A fist sized rock flies out of the smoke and passes through her chest causing her to blink and turn around just in time for another to pass through her face.

Tiny comes out of the dust and several pointed hoots have about half the monkeys jumping down from the wall and following her in a rush toward him, while the other half start to throw rocks at Perona's intangible form. All of them start howling and barking, making a deafening racket.

He's mostly occupied with using Shusui to cut down the ones who are attacking him, but he can hear Perona yelling in annoyance and more explosions going off. These creatures are pretty thick skinned; her small bombs don't seem to be doing much.

"Why don't you use the usual ones?" He yells, drawing Sandai Kitetsu because if he doesn't he's going to get skewered just from the sheer number of blades coming at him.

"It just makes them go berserk," she shouts back, irritated, "Cut it out you stupid baboons!"

The rocks continue you to pass through her as she spreads her arms out and a giant bomb shaped hollow appears, when she sends it down to latch onto one of the rock throwing monkeys, he turns and tries to run and is quickly flattened by an explosion that shakes the ground.

Everything goes quite for about half a second, but then Tiny lets out another bellow and all the others start fighting again.

"Come on," Perona demands, "This is annoying; we're going back to the castle."

"Going back would be as hard as going forward," he growls.

"The castle is closer."

"Every time I fight them the next time is more of a pain in the ass. It's better if we just push through."

"Suit yourself," she drifts upward

He shouldn't be surprised by this, "You're giving up."

"No, this just isn't worth the trouble," she stops in the air and leans back on the air, looking down at him as if to see if he will change his mind.

She really should know better by now, "Later Pinky, thanks for the stitches."

He focuses on fighting and she must leave soon after because the monkeys who were throwing rocks come down and, after a few hoots from Tiny, they switch out with the ones who had been harrying him before.

He notices shortly after that that Tiny has stopped engaging him herself, instead she is watching.

When the ones who are fighting him start to get overwhelmed, they retreat, and unlike before, she is no longer making an effort to rally them.

So this fight is going to be over soon.

But the next one is going to be much harder. He's being messed with again.

He makes a quick decision; this one is only good for groups anyway. He makes a quick spinning attack that sends all the monkeys immediately around him flying and tumbling into the ones further back.

In the ring of cleared space he turns to look for the leader. He's not surprised that she has already disappeared.

The others quickly disentangle themselves and slink away.

So, now Zoro is standing alone in the square.

He puts his blades away and surveys the area.

He had come in form that direction…?

He picks a road and starts walking. A few minutes later, just as he is reaching the edge of the ruins, one of Perona's hollows drifts down and circles around him before heading off in another direction.  
"I'm not going back to the castle."

The ghost drops several feet as if it forgot to fly for a second before it regains altitude to circle in front of him and waggle back and forth. It then goes back to its previous position and bobs up and down.

Zoro turns and continues in the direction he was headed before the ghost showed up. After about five steps the ghost shoots past him and disappears. What was that all about?

A few minutes later the ghost witch glides over the trees up ahead of him. She starts yelling as she drifts to a stop in front of him, "You are hopeless! You just went down this road less than an hour ago!"

Zoro looks around and then looks back at her with suspicion, he's pretty sure he didn't actually.

She slumps and sighs like all the problems of the world are on her shoulders before gathering herself back up and flying past him, "Come on you big idiot, now that those annoying monkeys are gone we can be at the coast in less than an hour if you stop screwing around."

She takes off at a fast glide and Zoro, lacking any better ideas, mentally shrugs and jogs after her.


	5. Chapter 5

After a tedious day of trial and error and at the cost of many broken boards and bent nails, he has a single plank thickness 'raft' of dubious stability.

Still, he has at least figured out how to get the boards to stick together without mangling either the board or the nail. That has to be considered some kind of progress.

"So, not ready to set sail yet?" Perona looks pleased with the state of the day's work, as if it proves something.

"I'm going to have to dig up more supplies."

"Yes, that will solve the problem."

"Does it hurt your eyes to do that so much?"

"No, fortunately I can't strain anything in my ghost form."

* * *

The next day he considers trying to wake Pinky up rather than waiting around who know how long, but after his search for her somehow leads him to the front door, he decides to just head out.

He's just entered the abandoned farmstead by the stream where he found the vegetables about a week ago when he sees a scout monkey drop out of one of the nearby trees and run off.

He sighs, he wanted to see if there were any more fish in the stream, but if he goes over now all the noise will just scare them off.

A few minutes later monkeys start appearing around the edges of the clearing. As they gather, he recognizes a few troop leaders, their hides still carrying marks from their former encounters. They don't move to engage him or each other, obviously waiting.

The reason comes clear when Tiny comes into view, two long, slightly curved blades at her side. She swings up into one of the trees and with a few hoots waves one of the troop leaders forward. Former troop leaders apparently.

As the first group comes forward, Zoro has to decide how he's going to deal with the fact that he has become an unwilling instructor to a bunch of monkeys. He sticks to one sword techniques at first, but by the time the first group has dropped back he's getting bored.

A couple of nights of sound sleep and semi decent food have him ready for more of a challenge, even if he is harboring _a few_ more scratches than usual.

He decides that holding back is practically admitting that these creatures _could_ beat him given a chance. He has a boat to build after all.

He puts Wado Ichimonji between his teeth and sets himself to clear the path.

This time when he defeats the last of her minions, rather than disappearing, she jumps down and grabs one of the swords now lying on the ground. She rubs it off on her fur before sticking the hilt in her mouth in a way that pulls back her lips emphasizing her fangs.

She opens with grunt and a charge like the one that took her down a few days ago. His boots leave furrows in the earth as he meets it head on, but when she sees he's unharmed she hisses in frustration and quickly moves on to other stolen techniques.

After a few minutes, Tiny and Zoro have managed to inflict a few cuts on bruises and cuts on each other, but she hasn't perfected her copy yet, so Zoro still has the upper hand. He can tell from the way her eyes are starting to shift around that she is considering breaking away and calling it quits for the day.

"If you go into a fight planning to run away, you're never going to win."

He probably shouldn't have said that, but this kind of half assed commitment irritates him.

That's enough to get her to refocus her attention. She growls and rolls her lips her back over her fangs before redoubling her efforts to get around his guard.

They are locked at a momentary standstill when her eyes shift over his shoulder and widen in sudden alarm.

'Neg-a-tive, Neg-a-tive'

He stiffens just as the hollow passes by his ear and directly into his opponent's face. Wait. Didn't the ghost witch say…

Tiny's eyes widen until he can see the white all the way around and the third blade drops from her mouth as she throws her head back and howls in despair and outrage.

She pushes forward aggressively, blades swinging wide and coming down with all the considerable force she can muster over and over while growling and snarling with rage.

He can deflect blows easily enough; all her technique has gone out the window. She is leaving herself wide open for a fatal strike.

He locks their blades and flips her over, but she just jumps up and charges at him again.

Pinky glides into view and leans back with her hands on her hips, "What are you waiting for idiot? Finish it off, otherwise it's just going to be more trouble later on."

Zoro makes a quick decision and redirects Tiny enough that the monkey's back is momentarily facing him.

He brings his hand together and drives the hilts of both blades into the base of her skull so that she abruptly goes silent and crashes face first into the ground.

He sheathes his weapons and looks up a Perona, "Are you ready to head to the harbor? I was starting to think you would sleep all day."

The ghost witch waves her hand at the fallen monkey, "You're just going to leave it like that? It's not dead," she adds as if he might not know.

"Don't worry about it Pinky."

"Well, don't expect any help from me later if you're going to be stupid about it," she admonishes him before dismissing the subject and gliding off through the trees with an offhand, "come on idiot."

* * *

About halfway through the day, after digging up more supplies, he decides to crack the prow off of a sail boat sunk in the harbor and push it up onto the stone walkway so he can see how it's put together.

When Perona comes back in the evening, he's crouched in front of the scrap of boat wiggling boards and running his fingers along seems. That shipwright (who'd turned out to be an assassin giraffe (but that was beside the point)) had said that the keel of the boat was the key part and everything was stuck to that. How would he make something like that?

"You look like one of the beasts you keep fighting, crouching there with that stupid look on your face." Her voice takes on an incredulous edge, "And you got yourself all dirty again! Why are you covered in mud? You smell awful!"

"The edge of the water is muddy."

"That doesn't explain anything!"

Zoro has to admit, to himself at least, that the mud now coating him up to his knees smells pretty foul.

"Let's go back to that farmstead with the creek. I'll clean my boots and maybe I can catch more of those fish. It would be a nice change from over cooked canned soup."

"Ah, yes burned fish would be a lovely change of pace." Never the less, she leads him back to the stream and hovers hopefully.

After scrubbing off his boots, thirty minutes of standing very still in the stream and striking quickly earns him four forearm length trout. Since he cooks them on a stove they are only slightly burnt this time.

* * *

The next morning Zoro over sleeps enough that Perona actually gets up before him. She eyes him sideways as he goes and scrapes some oatmeal out of the pot.

He chews determinedly at it for a while, but finds that he isn't all that hungry. Who would want to eat this stuff anyway?

"Go back to bed idiot. Even from here I can tell you're running a fever, your skin is all blotchy."

"I don't get sick."

"You went _swimming_ in mud yesterday with cuts all over your body."

"I have stuff to do," Zoro gets up to go.

"I'm not dragging your dumb ass back here a second time!," when he keeps walking, she tries, "Do you _want_ to lose your swords again?"

He's just about to reach the door when she declares, "Tell you what, if this doesn't knock you out I'll let you go."

Zoro has just enough time to suck in a breath before the bone chilling cold of a hollow passes through his chest and self-loathing at his own weakness rises up to suffocate him.

The last thing he feels before everything goes dark is his knees hitting the ground.

 _He is struggling against enemies who only ever get stronger, while he stays stuck in the same place. He is being driven back, ever closer to a cliff._

 _He hears his crewmates calling out, but he can't see them. And Luffy's voice, 'How could this happen to you? How could this happen while you were here?' Those words seem familiar. Where had he heard them before?_

 _There had been, on that island in the sky, opponents who seemed to be able to read their minds._

* * *

Zoro is woken from a restless slumber by the creak of the pantry door opening.

He cracks his eyes open, ready to give the pink witch a piece of his mind, only to jerk upright at the silhouette of a familiar blade over the shoulder of a tall, lean figure sporting an excessively fancy hat.

"Roronoa Zoro, why are you sleeping in my pantry?"

Oh yeah, right, there had been a reason why making free use of the house was a bad idea. And now it is standing between him and the door.

The World's Greatest Swordsman doesn't seem particularly hostile, more just confused, once the flat, declarative manner that is Dracule 'Hawkeyes' Mihawk's typical way of speaking is accounted for.

Zoro gets to his feet, forcing himself not to scramble since it's much too late to avoid getting caught out. "You'll have to ask Kuma why he decided to turn your home into a dumping ground."

"Dumping ground?" Mihawk's eyes flick just slightly to the side, as if listening for a distant sound, "I see." He doesn't seem concerned, just his usual slightly put out.

"You aren't here to challenge me," it's a statement. He somehow manages to convey with very little change in tone that he is relieved that Zoro isn't as stupid as he initially thought.

It goes without saying that the next time they duel, Zoro had better be ready to make good on the debt of having his life spared in their first encounter by giving Mihawk a genuine challenge for his title.

It's debt marked by a scar where it would have been easier for the older swordsman to simply cut him in half. Both a chance and a punishment given for being too stubborn back down the half dozen times he was given the chance to live if only he would admit he couldn't win. Zoro wears it with pride.

"No, I didn't know that this is your home. I've been trying to return to my crew since I arrived here, but the lack of a boat has been a hindrance."

Mihawk seems to realize something, "Come out here Roronoa. How long have you been here? And where did you last see your crew?"

Zoro picks up his swords and hooks them into his belt as he answers, "About three weeks ago, give or take a couple days. We were on Sabaody Archipelago."

"Sabaody…so what they say about Kuma's powers must be true," the warlord muses.

Mihawk focuses fully on Zoro again and he knows something dire has happened.

The older swordsman delivers the news with merciless precision, giving hope a clean death, "Your crew is no longer there. I encountered your captain at Marine Ford two weeks ago during a massive confrontation with the marines. He was severely injured, but he was taken from the battlefield under the care of those who seemed to be allies."

Zoro feels as if he has fallen off a cliff and can see the ground rushing up at him, "Injured!? Where is he? What happened?"

Mihawk narrows his eyes, assessing, but he continues before Zoro can explode with impatience.

"The marines sought to execute Whitebeard's second division commander, Fire Fist Ace. Whitebeard objected. As did your captain, as I'm sure you can imagine."

His voice takes on a tinge of respect as he continues, "Strawhat appeared suddenly upon the battlefield and strove relentlessly to reach his brother's execution platform. He was fortunate to have allies who protected him; he was out classed at almost every turn. I have never seen a man not only defy, but out right ignore the certainty of death so many times in the pursuit of a goal."

He pauses for a beat before delivering the final blow, "In the end they the marines succeeded in their goal. Though I would call it a pyric victory."

His eyes are sharp upon Zoro as he lays out this information. As if his reaction is of more interest than the battle itself. The blade has been struck; he wants to see if it will shatter.

Zoro freezes stock still, for a minute he can't even breathe. His mind refuses to take all this information in. But of course the details don't matter, "How far are we from Sabaody Archipelago?"

"Your captain is not there and this island is only a couple days sailing into the Grand Line."

"That's where our ship is, where we were ordered to meet. I need you to take me there."

"I will not…It's not even possible right now. You are showing a distasteful lack of forethought."

They are interrupted by Perona floating into the kitchen. When she spots Mihawk she rears back in alarm and several hollows spiral out to surround her.

Mihawk looks at the apparitions incuriously and then turns his gaze toward the ghost witch.

Whatever she sees in his eyes causes her to pale and the hollows abruptly pop out of existence.

"You are less foolish than this one it seems," he offers drily.

Perona has just started to relax fractionally as the sudden spike of Death in the air dissipates, when Zoro breaks back in, "Give me a boat. I will go to Sabaody on my own."

"The only other boat on this island is the row boat by the duck pond."

"I Don't Care. Give it to me. I Can't Stay Here."

Mihawk is not impressed by this declaration, "Fall upon your sword if you are so eager to die."

"Give him the boat, he won't die," Perona breaks in.

Zoro is startled by and a little suspicious of Perona's show of support.

"Not from drowning anyway," the Ghost Witch amends.

Mihawk considers the certainty of her assertion, then accedes, "It's in the shed by the pond."

Perona is surprisingly helpful in showing him to the shed, but by the time he's dragged out the small boat she's disappeared. He growls to himself, hoists the boat onto his shoulder, and starts trotting toward the harbor.

While he has been screwing around with half assed solutions, his captain was fighting for the life of his brother.

And he lost.

Zoro has never seen what Luffy does when standing up one more time will not give back what has been taken away.

He focuses on moving faster. He Needs to Get Back. He Needs to Find His Captain.

Despite his hurry, the road seems to twist even more than usual. He runs into group after group of monkeys, some of which he's never seen before.

He ends up at the base of one of the mountains again and, after catching himself staring blankly up at the oddly twisting vines, he turns and starts walking back the way he came.

The fever, blood loss, and just general fatigue, have him taking more injuries than usual. But it doesn't matter; his focus has narrowed down to his goal.

If he keeps walking eventually he has to get where he's going.

The sky is starting to turn toward the red of what passes for night time and he is panting with exhaustion and sweating despite the chill in air when he finally he finds himself in that strange square that marks the route to the harbor.

He must have entered at an odd angle because he doesn't realize where he is until he is standing almost under the giant wooden cross.

Of course there is another group of beasts hanging out here. It seems to be a favorite locale for them. He's fought this group before, as evidenced by the newer scars on their hides. They hoot at him in some combination of derision and greeting.

He's just another opponent now in their endless fight over wastelands and ruined towns.

He drops the boat and glares at the assembled beasts now blocking his way, "Either attack or get out of the way."

They oblige him by coming at him a few at a time.

He's so tired that if he fails to keep deflecting them correctly he's quickly going to be overwhelmed by brute strength, even if their technique is sloppy.

As he forces his mind to focus on each opponent as they charge toward him something strange happens.

It's not uncommon to come away from a fight feeling like he had been given an insight. The way a person fights says a lot about their personality, what they value, what they fear, and what they are willing to lay on the line.

He's fought these apes before and most of them are not particularly creative in their use of the techniques they are imitating. When it comes to reading opponents, this lot is written in a large font with short words.

In a flash of certainty, he _knows_ the one in front of him is going to strike at his left side and while he is open from blocking that swing the one beside him will stab under his arm.

He adjusts his attack, losing some force on the one in front in order to send the one coming at his side flying with a counter attack.

Unfortunately, that brief certainty distracted him from his environment.

He freezes for a second in denial.

The monkey he knocked away is lying in the splintered remains of the row boat.

The troop starts shrieking in derision at the look on his face, till he pulls himself together and points Sandai Kitetsu at their leader, "You come down her and fight me right now to decide this or none of you lot is leaving here alive! I don't have time for this!"

The leader obligingly jumps down while the rest start hooting to cheer him on. Zoro charges with an Onigiri, leaving two clean gashes down the lead monkey's chest.

But the attack lacks force, instead of collapsing, the big brute licks his finger and starts rubbing at the cuts as if they are just scratches, "You think you can heal that with Spit!? Where did you pick up a folk remedy like that anyway?!"

The leader flexes at his watching followers to show he is okay and receives further hoots of acclaim all around, as though they are at some kind of demonstration match, "These guys…! Just how much of a fool are they trying to make of me!? How am I meant to get out to sea like this!?"

This is clear proof that he has lost his focus to a shameful degree, but he doesn't care anymore.

He's sick of this island with its intractable, pointless problems. He has wasted so much time when his captain and crew need him and now he _is_ going to leave one way or another. He'll sort the rest out once he finally accomplishes that.

The monkeys are still in the middle of laughing at him when a cry of alarm goes up from the edge of the square and the whole troop suddenly goes still.

Zoro let's his swords fall to his side and turns toward the older swordsman, who is now perched on one of the ruined walls surrounding the cross.

Mihawk condescends to invite him back to the castle since the boat is broken, he's wounded, he can't seem to get past the monkeys, and it took him most of a day to make it about fifteen minutes' walk from where he started.

In the process he explains how the people of the island drove themselves into extinction and incidentally taught the native wildlife, the humandrills, the art of war.

If Hawkeye thought Zoro would be ready to give up, he has underestimated the urgency of the situation. None of that changes what needs to be done, "I Don't Take Orders From You! I'm Going To Sea!"

"I see. Well, as you wish," Mihawk's tone clearly conveys that he thinks his would be rival is being foolish, but he leaves, and Zoro quickly puts it out of his mind.

With Mihawk's departure the group he was fighting slinks away too, as if the sword master's presence had ruined their fun.

He picks up what's left of the front of the boat and starts walking again.

He's in that state that earned him the name of Demon, where anyone else would have collapsed from fatigue and blood loss, but he somehow keeps going anyway.

When the next troop steps out to try and engage him, he just drops the ruined boat, draws his blades, and lays into them without further ado. That strange insight comes to him again and, almost before he realizes it, they are all laying scattered around him, unconscious or whimpering in pain.

He doesn't run into any more monkeys after that.

Sometime between midnight and dawn he finally makes to harbor. He rolls the single layer raft into a log, ties it together with some scraps of rope and shoves the whole thing off the wall. Since the tide is high, it splashes into a few feet of water and floats with the top just barely above the surface.

Zoro jumps in after and sinks knee deep in mud. Cold water closes over his head and invades his nose.

He flails up, coughing, and puts his arms over the bundle. It has just enough buoyancy to keep most of his upper body out of the water.

He starts kicking.

He's about halfway across the harbor, when he hears Pinky's growl in frustration above and behind him, "It figures you would manage to find your way here when this is the last place you should be."

Zoro focuses on paddling, "Of course I got here, if I hadn't I'd still be walking."

"Go back to shore."

Zoro ignores her.

'Neg-a-tive, Neg-a-tive'

The ghost skims in low, and stops a few feet in front of his face.

He tries to get a grip on his focus. He Has To Get Away From This Island.

The hollow strikes his face

…and nothing happens.

He hears Perona 'wah' in surprise as he continues kicking. He's getting close to the breakwater that protects the harbor now.

Perona drops down in front of him, "Ok…Zoro…listen to me. You Are Going To Die. What good will that do anyone?"

He notices in an offhand kind of way that her words sound both genuinely worried and also kind of far away.

But if he doesn't keep going he will collapse and he doesn't have time for that.

Perona drops lower to get more in his face and opens her mouth to speak again. He drops his hand and then flings sea water up so that it passes through her intangible form. Her eyes widen in alarm just before she disappears.

The sea beyond the breakwater is, to put it mildly, much rougher. The pieces of rope he used to tie everything together snap and the bundle quickly starts to disintegrate. The water has gone from feeling pleasantly cool on his overheated skin, to freezing.

He keeps paddling. Or at least he thinks so; he can't really feel his legs anymore.

He's kind of drifting off when his feet catch on something solid and he looks up to see rocky shores and an endless forest of pine trees. He tries to steady himself and stand up, but his legs refuse to support him and instead he slides off the last scrapes of his raft and his head goes under water.

He flails around and gets about half air and half water in this lungs. He must black out because, the next thing he knows, an inhuman shadow is looming over him as the rocks of the beach dig into his back while freezing water pulls at his legs.

The shadow reaches down and he feels broad hands hauling him up onto a furry shoulder, "Chopper?"

"Ook."

Chopper would not be happy he let himself get into this state. But what choice did he have? He had to get back.

He's glad the doctor found him…

* * *

 _ **I am always tempted to leave excessively long explanations/excuses for why I chose to do this or that, but then I get self-conscious and just leave the notes blank and run away.**_

 _ **If anyone is wondering why I had Zoro act this way, well something pretty extreme must have happened between chapter 592 and 594.**_


	6. Chapter 6

Zoro wakes up to the sound of heeled boots making their way across tile and the feel of stairs digging into his back. The sound stops a few feet away and there is a rustle of paper.

He's just thinking maybe he should try opening his eyes when there's another rustle and a growl as Perona digs the toe of her boot into his side repeatedly to punctuate her words, "I should make you apologize for being so rude to me when I was trying to save your stupid life! How are you not dead!?"

She _seems_ to be trying to hurt him this time, but based on the fact that she's using her boots, she must just be venting. Her kicks couldn't break boards, let alone dent steel.

Zoro opens his eyes, Perona standing over him with a scowl, a newspaper bunched in the hand at her hip and a couple of hollows circling above her head, "What do you want Pinky?"

"The paper arrived about an hour ago," she says, waving it at him like she thinks it proves something.

"And?"

Perona huffs in irritation and drops the bundle on his face. He tries to lift his arms to remove the offending object, but they don't seem to want to move.

Pinky lets him struggle for a minute, "I wish I had a cameko snail right now."

She picks up the paper and holds it so that Zoro can see the picture of Luffy in the center of the page, "Seeee, you nearly killed yourself for nothing."

His captain is covered in bandages. Zoro feels some relief that someone has tended to Luffy's wounds and that he's not alone.

His face is somber and his hat is placed over his heart, but his feet are splayed and his other hand is clenched in a fist. Solemn but determined.

His captain has made a decision. Zoro just has to figure out what it is.

He scans the article describing Luffy's return to Marineford and the elaborate, un-Luffy like ritual he carried out. It mentions Rayleigh and the former warlord, Jinbe.

"Hey! Are you done yet? My arms are getting tired!"

Oh, yeah she's still here. The order has to be coded into his actions or appearance somehow.

"Just a minute," Zoro starts thinking out loud, in the hope of preventing her from leaving, "There's something here…Luffy isn't the sort of guy to do this kind of thing."

So why did he do it? "If Rayleigh's with him, then this must've been his idea… There's got to be something more to it...!"

He's been focusing on the description of Luffy's actions because actions are usually what matters with his captain, but if this was Rayleigh's idea maybe he was focusing on the wrong thing.

About a minute later, Perona drops the paper back on his face, and clomps off.

With some effort he shifts around until he's leaning one shoulder against the wall lining the steps and the paper is in his lap.

There aren't any footsteps this time before he hears, "Are you ready to behave in a more reasonable manner?" Mihawk's tone suggests that Zoro is a toddler that has finally worn himself out flailing on the floor, "There's some noodles left from dinner if you can get yourself to the kitchen."

Zoro has finally noticed the mark on Luffy's arm in the picture. There is a sense of relief. The captain has given an order and its nature implies confidence that the others are alive to see it. The path has been made clear again.

He looks up at Mihawk and smiles, "You know how to cook? These last few weeks have been murder on my stomach."

"Indeed, the ghost woman started crying over her plate," There is definitely a note of amusement n there somewhere.

As Zoro works to lever himself up to his feet, Mihawk adds more seriously, "You two have made a mess of my home, particularly the kitchen, you will put it to rights before anything else is done."

* * *

Mihawk allows him to shovel down some noodles in tomato sauce and crash on the pallet in the pantry for several hours, but when he wakes up the older swordsman sets him to cleaning up one of the many spare guest rooms until it is fit to be occupied.

"After you are done there you can help clean all the dirty sheets and towels that have been left lying around."

"Pinky has been living here for weeks, I've only been here a couple days."

"She's been scrubbing down the kitchen and the bathroom. She seems to think the endeavor might kill her," he seems to be wondering if Zoro is going to be similarly melodramatic about doing a little house work.

Zoro goes back to sweeping up the copious amounts of dust gathered on the floor of the previously unused room.

The World's Greatest Swordsman can't be expected to play house keeper to a couple of uninvited guests after all.

"I recharged the dials in the water heater and I'll make lunch in a couple hours. If you've finished cleaning up the mess you've made you can clean up and join me."

Zoro nods.

"We are several days sailing from the port city of Angustus," he adds dryly, "I find myself in unexpected need of supplies. In about a week conditions should be favorable to head there. You may make your way wherever you wish from there."

Zoro nods again and Mihawk walks off.

So he has a few days to convince Mihawk to let him stay.

Luffy's orders are clear: two years to become stronger before they meet up again.

He's been struggling to develop a new technique for a while. At Enis Lobby he managed to manifest some kind of demon aura from the sheer rage at what was being done to Robin, but since then he hasn't made any progress being able to call that ability up at will.

He's grown somewhat in pure physical strength, but hasn't mastered any new techniques even though he _knows_ they exist. He's fought against them.

Until he can grasp them, he's never going to be anywhere near a match for Mihawk.

It's pretty obvious what he needs to do.

He needs to convince Mihawk though.

* * *

He heads out in the evening to find some sparing partners.

Of course now that he's looking for the monkeys, they are nowhere to be found.

After a couple hours he somehow finds himself approaching the front of the palace. He's surprised to see a fairly large gathering of humandrills along the retaining wall that lines the broad top landing of the front steps. From the front door they would be fairly well hidden, but from this angle they are in plain sight.

Tiny is sitting on the railing at the top of the step staring at the door, chin on her fist, looking bored.

"Mihawk is back you know," he calls out to them from a dozen paces away.

Tiny does a double take and nearly falls off the railing, while the rest of the troop shrieks in surprise and scrambles into more defensive positions.

When he makes eye contact, they shuffle uncertainly.

"If you're going to fight, give me your best. Anyone who runs away today is getting a blade through the back."

There is a little bit of shuffling at this, but Tiny rolls back her lips and hisses at them before going into a tirade of hooting and growls that involves her slapping her chest several times and also puffing herself up and making noises in a jeering way that suggests she is throwing their own boasts back in their faces.

They all settle down, some of them looking determined others sulky.

That done, Tiny makes her way down the stairs in a sideways knuckle walk and then stands upright to draw the three blades she is carrying with her.

She opens with a familiar charge, followed up by a variety of other moves she has learned from him over the past couple weeks.

Zoro quickly starts to feel like he is sparing with his own shadow.

As they move back and forth around the open area in front of the palace, something like anger starts to come into her face. She seems to realize he isn't pulling out any new techniques.

She calls over her shoulder to one of her followers leaning against the wall, disgruntled, and they respond, clearly defensive. A couple others, sporting fresh scars, grumble in agreement.

"Heh, I'm still trying to get the hang of that one." She glares at Zoro, like she thinks he's screwing around.

It's frustrating; he can feel that extra sense, like something at the corner of his eye.

He's reminded to pay attention when Tiny nearly jabs him in the eye.

Every opponent has tells in the way they shift their weight, grip their weapon, move their eyes. All these things come after the thought.

If he could take all those twitches and shifts and trace them backward they would intersect at his opponent's intentions. He realizes he's reaching the wrong way.

He blocks all three of her blades only to get kicked in the stomach so hard that half a second later he gets another impact into the wall by the stairs. Monkeys scatter out of his flight path, shrieking in alarm.

He takes Wado Ichimonji out of his mouth so he can spit out some blood before moving in again.

He focuses on not focusing on any one thing. He needs to take it all in.

For a moment it feels like he woke up from a dream in which he thought he was already awake.

He moves to block where he knows Tiny's swords are going to be.

He loses his grip on it after only a few heart beats, but by that time two of Tiny's swords are striking the ground and blood is welling up from shallow cuts that extend from between his opponent's thumb and index fingers to her elbows. She is staring at him wide eyed.

To his surprise, given their early timidity, several of her followers cry out in alarm and charge him, getting between them.

Tiny retreats, but only as far as the wall, where she leans to watch, licking at her forearms like a cat. She squints at him as if trying to discern something that her eyes are not quite sharp enough to see.

"That doesn't work!" he shouts in her general direction, not taking his eyes off his new challengers.

She finishes her grooming and holds up her forearm to show that it has, in fact, stopped bleeding. The spit had nothing to do with it, Zoro is pretty sure.

Tiny seems satisfied at first that she has recovered from her injury so quickly, but as he continues to fight and knock down her followers she starts to lean forward more and more, bobbing her head around.

Eventually, she starts and pacing back and forth along the wall and even smacks her hands against the ground in frustration.

She can't see what he is doing, so she can't copy it.

It's still only coming in flashes, but he seems to be able to call it up a little easier now. Only for a moment, but each time another opponent falls.

A couple of the humandrills do try to run and, true to his word, they get a flying slash to the back.

Tiny starts to berate and encourage her followers with hoots and growls, she's clearly angry, but it seems to be directed at her followers.

They renew their efforts even though they aren't having much success breaking through his guard and are still getting knocked out.

Zoro grins at her around the hilt in his mouth, "You really have a way with words."

She bares her fangs and makes several growling and hooting noises followed by a rude gesture she must have picked up from the former human inhabitants of the island.

She has a point.

 _Chopper had commented once that he found it odd that, of all the species on the planet, humans were the only ones who could only talk to their own kind._

 _Robin had found his comment very interesting and, ironically, their conversation about animal linguistics had quickly become so technical it was incomprehensible to everyone else at the table._

Zoro finishes knocking out the last of Tiny's followers. In response, she jumps down and picks her blades up again.

This time when she charges him he can see anger and an edge of desperation in her strikes.

He can also feel a pain building behind his eyes. This new technique is definitely straining something, but he's got a grasp on it now and he's not going to let go.

He feels something trickle down around his nose. Tiny's grins at him and her fighting regains some of its confidence.

He blinks the irritant away and keeps fighting.

When she still can't break through his guard, even as the blood leaking out of his nose and eyes starts to interfere with his vision and drip off his chin, her uncertainty comes back in even greater force and her strikes become more vicious and uncontrolled.

Finally, she jumps back and takes up a familiar stance, her three blades arranged in a pinwheel.

Zoro takes up his own finishing stance, "Don't let it get to you so much. You've run into something that's giving you trouble. That's when you find out who you really are."

She covers the despair that flashes in her eyes with a snarl around the blade in her mouth.

In a flash, six blades cross and the impact causes a shockwave of dust and rocks to roll away from their meeting point and rattle the windows of the palace.

Zoro straightens up from his charge. Behind him he hears the thud of Tiny's body hitting the ground, followed closely by the chiming of her shattered blades clattering down around her.

He allows himself to let go of his death grip on his new perception.

The pressure behind his eyes is relieved just a bit and Zoro suddenly realizes he really needs a nap.

He leans up against the base of the stairs and falls asleep.

* * *

He's woken up what seems like short time later by one of Pinky's exploding hollows. As he sticks a finger in his ear to try and clear out the ringing, he hears her demand, "Do you want to get stabbed in your sleep!?"

He squints up at her, "What?"

"Ack!," Perona darts up in alarm, "What the hell happened to your face?! Are you bleeding out of your eyes?!"

Zoro rubs at his face, "No, it stopped a while ago."

He holds up his hand to show that the blood is dry and flaking.

She opens her mouth and Zoro tries to stop the tirade that is about to happen, "Don't you have someone else to bother now?"

"Mihawk is no fun," Perona pouts. Zoro scowls at the implication that he is somehow entertaining, but the ghost witch doesn't seem to notice, "What are you doing out here _now_?"

"I got a lead on something the other day," he smiles as he levers himself up, "I got to it happen again."

"You were deliberately recreating the state you were in the day before yesterday," she clarifies, "when you nearly died."

"It worked."

He goes inside to find Mihawk.

* * *

His plan was make himself interesting by mastering this new skill on his own. It works better than he had hoped, he doesn't even have to explain what he's figured out, Mihawk seems to already realize.

Asking for Mihawk's help is a blow to his pride, but coming back to his crew without having done everything he can to get stronger would be a cause for regret. And that is by far the less acceptable consequence.

Mihawk seems to understand this as well without it being explained. He was ready to despise him for making a choice out of fear, but this motivation, to fight for something greater than pride, seems to make the normally stern swordsman outright cheerful.

Zoro's declaration that he still intends to defeat Mihawk someday, even though he is asking the older swordsman to teach him, only seems to make Mihawk more open to the idea despite his assertion that Zoro is being ridiculous.

* * *

The ghost witch had told Mihawk not to boss her around when he had ordered her to care for Zoro's injuries and then almost immediately turned around and bullied him upstairs to fix his bandages again. "Are you finally going to stop getting yourself torn to pieces?"

"Unlikely." Mihawk's training was bound to be demanding.

She tries to choke him with the bandages she's wrapping around his neck, "You shouldn't seem so pleased about that."

When she's done she sits down beside his bed and asks, "So, what was that all about anyway? I thought you were in a huge hurry to leave."

Zoro gives her the paper and explains the message that Luffy had sent his crew: two years to get stronger before they head to the new world.

"What about you?" Zoro asks, "Mihawk said Moria probably isn't dead, I thought you wanted to find him."

Perona leans back and her eyes widen slightly, as if the question had surprised her.

Abruptly, she stands up and looks down her nose at him, "Don't worry about it idiot. Unlike you, I don't intend to run off without even having any idea where I'm going."

He wouldn't have thought too much of it except that her ghosts had stopped circling lazily around the room and come to hover near her shoulders just before she spoke.

Huh, so now that she can leave she doesn't want to anymore.

Zoro shrugs, "If Mihawk is okay with you mooching off him, it's none of my business."

She sniffs at him, then turns and strides out of the room as if she has somewhere important to be.

* * *

Zoro tries to be patient. He meditates, practices his katas, and limits himself to only a couple thousand sit ups and pushups a day. However, by the morning of the third day he's already starting to feel cooped up. How long is he going to be expected to sit around?

He looks up at the back of the newspaper Mihawk is reading. Perona and he are sitting across from each other, a few seats down from where the older swordsman is sitting at the end of the banquet sized dining table drinking coffee.

Mihawk doesn't look up from the paper, "I haven't forgotten you're here."

Zoro grumpily shovels in another mouthful of oatmeal, "What do you consider healed up?"

"I want you to be able to practice for more than five minutes without bleeding or breaking something spontaneously. You aren't supposed to bleed without being cut, you know."

Perona snorts into her bowl. Zoro scowls and opens his mouth to retort.

"Do what you want, but I won't train you until Perona stops having to rebandage you every day. Your body is part of your weapons. You wouldn't treat your swords in as shabby a manner as you've been treating yourself."

Zoro doesn't mention that he has broken quite a few swords over the years.

* * *

Zoro goes through his katas slowly in the courtyard as he tries to evaluate how his various cuts, cracked bones, and bruised organs are holding up.

He doesn't like this; it feels too much like giving into weakness. But he asked Mihawk to train him; he's obliged to follow his instructions now.

He sees a shadow lurking in the trees, but doesn't acknowledge it.

Eventually Tiny comes out and starts shadowing his forms.

"This is all stuff you ripped off from me already."

She lowers her swords and shrugs at him.

They stare at each other for a few seconds.

Zoro goes back to his practice. Tiny goes back to copying him.

This goes on the next day and the next. Perona finally removes the last of his stiches and he's down to just the bandages around his chest.

Zoro admits to himself that he's feeling more energetic than he has in a long time, but he's still wondering how long he has to 'not bleed' before Mihawk will stop making him wait.

* * *

The next morning when he goes out onto the back courtyard, there is a row of stuffed hybrid monstrosities sitting on the railing, staring at him with creepy button eyes.

He finds his way back to the kitchen and slams the door open to find Perona sitting, happily eating pancakes and Mihawk reading the paper and drinking tea.

"Pinky, what the hell?" She has to be responsible for this somehow.

She looks up disinterested, "Hmm?"

He waves a cow-wolf thing in her general direction.

"Oh, that's not bad!" She jumps up and grabs it out of his hand to inspect it, "The smaller ones are actually kind of cute. They look like surprised coconuts."

"Smaller what?"

"About a week ago, when I was putting Gentleman Badgerphant together, I noticed a few of the younger ones watching me. They kept coming back, so a couple days ago I took some of the old sheets and curtains that are lying around everywhere and brought them out with me. They were really excited about it."

"So by yesterday evening I had all these new friends!" She holds the toy up and spins. Zoro isn't sure if she's referring to the young humandrills or their sewing projects.

"I guess they made more overnight," She hugs the dubious plush to her chest and trots off, presumably to inspect the other offerings.

Mihawk looks up from his morning paper just long enough to say, "Find something else to distract those monkeys."

Then he goes back to reading as though the matter has been taken care of.

"Are you serious?"

"I'm always serious," Mihawk returns in a tone that is too dry even for him.

"I'll need some supplies."

This gets the older swordsman to look up at him again, "You've already thought of something?"

"There aren't a lot of options."

He eats what left of the pancakes and goes out to the disused garden just outside the kitchen. It doesn't take him long to find what he's looking for in the remains of a closet set against the castle wall.

He takes the tools and walks until he finds himself in the clearing with the rows of stones. This will do.

He starts tearing up weeds and breaking up chunks of earth that have settled and grown hard after not being turned for years.

Perona comes and leans against one of the stone blocks, a thing that looks like a ball of hair with tusks under her arm, "I thought we'd established that you only know how to stab things."

Zoro snorts, "Do I look like a noble's son to you? Only the rich can spend all their time learning to fight."

Perona looks doubtful, "I guess so. What exactly are you doing?"

Zoro tells her.

She shifts her weight from one foot to the other, waiting for him to admit he's joking. When he just continues to hack away at the ground, she wilts slightly before sighing and disappearing back into the trees. Presumably in the direction of the castle.

It's a decent workout, breaking up the overgrown soil and digging up rocks.

Tiny comes out of the trees and watches him for a while before going over to the pile of tools and poking at it suspiciously. She scratches her head then knuckle walks back into the trees.

She comes back a little while later with some of her followers, not the troop leaders, but some of the ones that usually just watch.

They pick up some of the tools and start imitating him in a forceful and somewhat haphazard way, each picking their own patch of ground.

Several hours later, Zoro stops working and the humandrills follow suit, most of the troop going to relax under the trees. They've overturned a good portion of the clearing.

Tiny leans on the hoe she had been using, contemplating the field, confusion in her beady eyes.

Zoro's idea seems to be working, but he's not really sure why, "I've seen other animals that worked with or imitated humans, but there was always something in it for them, usually food or safety. Why are you imitating me when you don't even know what I'm doing?"

She gives him an exasperated look and then purses her lips as if thinking before knuckle walking a short distance to a creek flowing by the edge of the field where she starts picking up rounded, greyish stones.

Zoro waits to see what she will do. He did ask a question, he needs to give her a chance to answer.

She comes back, stomps an area of newly turned earth flat with her foot, draws a circle with her finger, dumps the river stones into the circle and, finally, spreads them out into a single layer.

She waves him down impatiently. Zoro obligingly sits on his heels the other side of the circle.

Tiny lifts one of the pebbles and taps it against another. She picks up the tapped pebble and draws a finger across her throat before setting it aside.

Zoro points at the stones, "Each of these represents a monkey?"

She moves her hands apart in a 'bigger' gesture.

"A troop?"

She rocks her hand, 'sort of.'

"A battle?" She nods. So, one tap equals multiple deaths.

She taps two more stones together, removing one. She reels her left hand in an 'on and on' gesture, while repeating this process several more times with her right.

"This has been going on for a while, that's obvious from just looking around."

She picks up a stone; a dark red compared to the grey of the others, and makes eye contact as she taps her chest several times.

She then uses her stone to tap out several others and remove them from the circle. She's been involved in the fighting too.

She picks up a greenish stone and waves it at him with a fang filled grin, until he says, "Yeah, I get it."

She proceeds to tap the green stone on several others including her own, but not remove them. She scratches her head as if in confusion and sets the green stone toward the edge of the circle.

The tapped pebbles are then picked up and each quickly 'defeats' several others, leaving a cleared area around itself. A handful of pebbles are set aside.

By defeating opponents but not killing them, letting them learn, he had upset the balance of power. The number of humandrills being killed had suddenly increased because he had spared the ones he fought.

The red and green stones and a third are set near each other. She looks up at him.

"Yeah, I remember that."

Tap. The extra stone is moved aside.

"You left out the bit where you tried to stab me in the back."

In response she picks up the handful of recently 'dead' stones and pours them through her hand into her palm.

"I didn't make them do that."

She curls her lip at him, but sets the stones back on the ground.

She taps the green stone against the red one again then sets the green one aside again. She picks up her own stone and examines it as if contemplating its existence.

Carefully, she reaches out and taps one of the other stones with an area cleared around it. Rather than removing it, she moves it to the center of a cleared area. She gathers several others in a similar manner.

Zoro's stone contacts a few others and leaves them. Tiny collects them as well. Stones that try to attack her collection get incorporated instead.

"So you've got quite a clan going."

She holds up a single long pointer finger before picking up several stones within the group and striking them against her own. She's being challenged.

Some of her followers leave and go out to conquer previously untouched groups. Some of them come back and take from the edge of her group.

She picks those up and squeezes them in her palm before laying them on the pile of the dead.

She covers the remaining stones in her group with her hand, clutching the rocks to her chest. She had started to create stability, but it's already falling apart.

"You all survive by imitating humans. But this lot got it wrong," there's no need to gesture; they're surrounded on all sides as far as the eye can see in destruction.

Zoro stands up and crosses his arms, "I don't know if farming is going to help with any of that. Mihawk just wants Pinky to stop destroying his linens."

Tiny perks up and points at the field, "Ook?"

Is she asking what he's planning? "I was thinking cabbages would grow well here. Maybe some root vegetables."

Tiny is far more excited by this idea then he expected. She jumps up and does a little dance, clapping her long arms over her head.

He smiles, "Let your friends know then."

* * *

She brings a larger group with her the next day, including some he remembers defeating a few times.

On the third day a larger monkey shows up and starts a harangue at the edge of the field they are working on. A few of the newcomers crouch down guiltily. They must have come here without permission.

Tiny drops her spade, takes her swords off her back, and makes a declaration while holding the blade over her head and gesturing around.

Thumping her chest, she resheathes her swords and goes back to chopping at the ground, point made.

Whatever she said it must have been pretty inspiring. There are hoots of approval all around before the humandrills get back to work with renewed enthusiasm.

The other troop leader crouches, looking sullen and murderous, but reluctant to attack.

His followers uncertainly go back to work, except for one that cautiously sidles up to him. She starts waving her hands around as if explaining something to him.

He looks intrigued, "Ook?"

She nods affirmatively. The other leader rubs his jaw in thought and then knuckle walks over to the tools and picks up a spade, examining the blade and testing the handle with his teeth before he seems satisfied.

He starts digging away at the edge of the field, the one who had spoken with him, happily working alongside him.

Zoro thinks that if the cabbages don't work out there is going to be hell to pay.

* * *

"The monkeys seem to be pretty excited about the idea of vegetables," Zoro reports to Mihawk that night, "I'm going to need some seeds and supplies to plant a field though."

Mihawk seems a little surprised at this declaration, and then he _smiles_ at him again. "I will be heading out in a couple more days, give me a list of what you need." He adds, speaking to himself, "They could actually go back to farming..."

Zoro thinks to ask, "How did you know that the monkeys can be taught to be peaceful?"

Mihawk considers how much to say, "When I first left this island twenty five years ago, the village just down the road was a place where important meetings were held. Everyone knew the consequences of committing any act of violence under the Tree of Peace would be dire, since the humandrills lived in its branches."

That would explain why it still seemed to be one of their favorite places to gather.

That massive tree could only have been carved up by one person, "And you decided to turn the island's sacred tree into a memorial?"

"The tree was dead. When the volcano at the center of the island became active…" Mihawk trails off when Zoro looks confused. He asks, "You never wondered where the red light comes from?"

Zoro shrugs, "It let me see at night."

Mihawk actually blinks when he realizes that's all Zoro is going to say, "The smog from the volcano made it colder here, it probably killed the Tree of Peace and caused crops to fail. The resulting food shortages would easily have sparked the conflict that consumed everything. It seemed appropriate that the dead tree would serve as a marker for the people it could no longer watch over."

He speaks as a connoisseur of such things. No doubt he and Robin could have some thoroughly morbid conversations about all the ways and reasons people come up with to kill each other. Zoro has never worried himself over details like that.

"You don't seem very broken up about what's become of this place."

Mihawk gave him a very direct look, but the man had wanted to know his character, it seemed only fair to return the favor. His answer is cold, "It was, in most regards, typical in the variety of human nature displayed."

Zoro isn't sure if he really cares so little or just isn't in the mood to conveniently explain what drives him, "So the monkeys aren't what destroyed everything?"

"The humandrills certainly amplified the damage, but they would not have started the fighting." Mihawk asserts.

Zoro nods, that's probably true, they almost certainly finished it though.

"I will be leaving for about a week. If you don't do anything foolish," he pauses, as if considering the likelihood of this, "you should be recovered enough begin training when I get back."

Zoro grins; finally he can start moving forward again.

Just seven hundred and five days left to get stronger before he sees his crewmates again.

No problem.

* * *

 _ **A few people commented that their favorite parts were Zoro thinking about the rest of the crew. If so, you might like the short pieces I wrote for 'Life is Confusion,' they have a similar tone. I am working on a few more stories for that series, although I write super slow, so sorry in advance for the wait.**_

 _ **I imagine Zoro growing up some place poor but relatively safe. In the manga we only see Zoro wearing a school gi so we are given no clue regarding his family situation. But as soon as he found out Luffy was a pirate he wanted nothing to do with him. Zoro considered becoming a criminal 'giving up,' meaning he still believed to some degree in the order of the government. Kind of naïve, although that's not a word one would normally associate with Zoro.**_

 _ **Also, one of them had to have taught the monkeys how to grow cabbages. Of the three of them, Zoro seems the most likely to have that kind of background.**_

 _ **If Mihawk was living on an island by himself he would have to know how to do things like cook, clean, and do home repairs, since he obviously wasn't living in filth. So, I put it in there even though I'm pretty sure nobody was asking for it.**_

 _ **References to Zoro's time skip story:**_

 _ **Chap. 524 pg. 10 -12**_

 _ **Chap. 559/560 covers**_

 _ **Chap. 592 pg. 2-7**_

 _ **Chap. 594 pg. 15**_

 _ **Chap. 597 pg. 2-6**_

 _ **Chap. 779 pg. 11**_

 _ **Chap. 826 cover**_


End file.
